Writing towards death: male patient voices and medical landscape in two Egyptian illness narratives

In the field of medical humanities, illness narratives are often central to most discussions. However, Arabic-language illness narratives, particularly those written by males, are largely absent from this body of scholarship, which centres mostly on Anglophone corpora. This scholarly blind spot affects the linguistic as well as the cultural scope of research on embodied suffering and the voices of patients from Arabic-speaking regions. Thus, this study addresses this gap by reading illness narratives by two Egyptian male authors: the late Osama Eldanasouri's Kalbi al-Harim Kalbi al-Habib: al-Nusus al-Akhira or [My Ageing Dog, My Beloved Dog: The Last Texts] (2007/2021) and the late Muhammad Abouelgheit's Ana Qadim Ayyuha al-Daw' or [Oh Light, I am Coming] (2022). The first is a narrative of Eldanasouri's prolonged suffering from Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), resulting in his dependence on dialysis as a lifeline, while the other is an account of Abouelgheit's terminal cancer. The study draws on Critical Medical Humanities' attentiveness to gender and sociocultural factors in the embodied experience of illness; masculinity studies, especially the representation of the ill male body; and Michael Bury's conceptualisation of biographical disruption. Utilising this combined framework, the study examines how representations of illness, death, and mortality vary across different illness temporalities (prolonged CKD vs accelerated mortality); how the narratives challenge conventional notions of masculinity; and how both narratives are shaped by contrasting medical geographies and institutional conditions. Read in tandem, these texts offer a more nuanced understanding of Bury's rigid before/after model, often associated with biographical disruption, and steer the narratives towards autothanatography, where writing is influenced by a heightened awareness of narrowed futurity. In addition, the study argues that texts construct narratives of sick male patients not as a straightforward self-expression but as a negotiated response to bodily vulnerability as well as culturally valued forms of hegemonic masculinity. Meanwhile, the narratives construct an image of disparate illness experiences mediated by two different medical contexts. Thus, this adds to the ongoing critical medical humanities scholarship by analysing Arabic-language male illness narratives, which broadens the linguistic and cultural scope of the field.