Both Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt and Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family present problematic representations of a male emigrant's dissociation from his own cultural, racial, and familial heritage. The emigrant's sense of estrangement is intensified by socially constructed codes of masculinity: these codes align the male subject with an orientalist discourse complicit with the neo-colonial ideologies of the West. Hassan's journey "out of Egypt" to the United States exemplifies the ways in which masculine severance cooperates with the politics of neo-colonial imperialism: Hassan's blunt articulation of his desire to be severed from his Egyptian past may reinscribe the Orientalist discourse that simultaneously desires and dismisses the non-West. Running the in Family also foregrounds the male emigrant's severance from his familial and cultural past, but whereas Hassan refuses to return to the past, Ondaatje is fascinated by it. Ondaatje returns (physical and imaginatively) to Sri Lanka to formulate a new understanding of his deceased father; however, in a text fueled by the desire for knowledge of the father -- a bid for a kind of power -- Ondaatje admits failure. The two "autobiographies" articulate the contradictions and slippages that occur in the gender system when the autobiographical subject undergoes the dislocations of racial, national, and cultural identifications.
