A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (18 page)

Nevertheless, the appearance of female characters in Arabic fiction shows some of the gains that were being made. Mahfouz’s novels, for example, are often concerned with the emancipation of women from their traditional roles and the various kinds of stresses to which this could give rise. The expansion of women’s roles and life-chances is a major feature of the
Cairo Trilogy
, for example: whereas Amina, wife of Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, lives a highly restricted life in volume one, Sawsan Hammad, fiancée of her grandson Ahmad, is a political activist and feminist in volume three. In works like
Midaq Alley
and
The Beginning and the End
the choices open to women within the family or in the larger social environment are explicitly identified and their narrowness criticized. Both of these novels dramatize the apparent impossibility of escape from the narrow environment of home and family, leading Hamida in the former novel and Nefisa in the latter to despairing, tragic ends.

Even more than Mahfouz, middle-brow writers of the 1950s and 1960s such as the journalist and novelist Ihsan Abdel-Quddus made the throwing off of the constrictions on women’s lives into an explicit theme of their writings. One of Abdel-Quddus’s best-known novels, for example,
I Am Free
,
¹¹
deals with the struggle of a young woman from a middle-class family to detach herself from inherited
moeurs
and to choose a life to her own liking. It is the freedom to make such choices that allows her to say at the end of this text, ‘I am free’. Elsewhere in the Arab world, Leila Baalbaki in Lebanon achieved a
succès d’estime
with her 1957 novel
I Live
and became as representative an author of the period as Françoise Sagan, author of
Bonjour tristesse
, in France.
I Live
dramatized the condition of young women in at least some parts of the Arab world who were finding new paths for themselves in defiance of inherited conceptions of a woman’s role and status in society.
¹²
Baalbaki is also the author of a much-anthologized short story, ‘A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon’;
¹³
another Lebanese woman writer often compared to Baalbaki and Sagan is Colette Khouri (b. 1937), the author of a novel,
Days with Him
, in which the heroine ‘abandons her feckless lover’.
¹⁴
Finally, in 1960 the Egyptian novelist Latifa al-Zayyat, less journalistic and more intellectual in profile, published a striking
bildungsroman, The Open Door
, which was taken at the time as summarizing the aspirations of the ‘new woman’. She now realized herself in the context of national and political struggle, leaving the private sphere of home and family far behind her.
¹⁵

Yet, despite the interest of this early work it was only in the 1970s in the work of the Egyptian feminist Nawal al-Saadawi and the Moroccan Fatima Mernissi (originally written in French) that Arab feminism began to gain real international exposure. Al-Saadawi is perhaps the best-known contemporary Arab feminist, and many of her books have been translated into English.
Woman at Point Zero
, for example, is a fictional reconstruction of the life of a prostitute, while
The Hidden Face of Eve
is a wide-ranging work on women in the Arab world. Al-Saadawi is also the author of various autobiographical works, among them
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor
and
Memoirs from the Women’s Prison
.
¹⁶

14. Egyptian feminist and novelist Nawal al-Saadawi

These two books present the struggle of Egyptian and Arab women for equal consideration with men through al-Saadawi’s memories of her own career. Herself a distinguished physician, at one point holding a senior position in the Egyptian ministry of health, al-Saadawi comments in
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor
on the stilted
expectations that hold many women back in the Arab world and on the suffocating framework within which many are condemned to live their lives. Early in her life, she became aware that she was a ‘girl’; in other words a potential source of shame. Whereas boys were allowed to do what they liked, girls were shut away indoors, ‘as if … in chains’, condemned to the ‘hateful, constricted world of women with its permanent reek of garlic and onions’. A conflict developed ‘between me and my femininity’, and she was ‘filled with a great contempt for womankind’. Whereas ‘manhood was a distinction and an honour, … womanhood was a weakness and a disgrace,’ the only way out of which being through education. Al-Saadawi chose medicine as a challenge and an escape, as well as a way of proving that she was the equal of any man. Men, in fact, she later discovers, are frauds, their self-confidence merely a reflection of the fact that they, unlike their sisters, mothers or wives, feel that they ‘own the past, the present and the future’.
¹⁷

Against masculine posturing al-Saadawi pits ‘my strength, my knowledge, [and] my success in my work’, qualities that come to the fore in
Memoirs from the Women’s Prison
. Arrested in a crackdown against the opposition in September 1981, al-Saadawi was sent to prison. Meeting her fellow prisoners, some of whom are intellectuals but most of whom are not, she draws a connection between the state’s authoritarian control of the public sphere and the authority exercised by a father, a brother or a husband over the lives of women in the private sphere of the family. ‘Behind every one of these women prisoners is a man: a father branding his daughter for a life of thievery, a husband beating his wife into practising prostitution, a brother threatening his sister so she will smuggle hashish.’ Despite their political differences, or, in the case of the non-political prisoners their lack of political awareness, al-Saadawi stages herself as leading a kind of ‘feminist revolt’ against the policies of the state (‘Down with the Open Door Policy, and Camp David, and normalization of relations!
Down with the new colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism!’) and the rule of men in general.
¹⁸

It is striking how little reference contemporary Arab women writers make to al-Saadawi. Rather than continuing her activism, their writings seem to be self-absorbed, making only glancing reference to public concerns. Miral al-Tahawy has already been noted in this context, and May Telmissany might also be mentioned, whose novel
Dunyazad
established her as an author to watch.
¹⁹
In this short piece, 120 pages all told, Telmissany opens up a ‘societal space that male writers have been unable (and perhaps also unwilling) to explore: the complexities of family relationships and especially of gender differences,’ in the words of her translator. Organized around the death of a child, Dunyazad, the novel recounts a mother’s agonizing grief over her loss. The writing functions both as an attempt to communicate the ‘taste, shape, and smell of pain’ and as a form of therapy: the story is like a personal diary not meant to be read by others, working instead as a way out of loss. ‘Writing Dunyazad,’ the author explains, means ‘invoking the letters of her name to help me forget.’ Dunyazad, the name of Shaharazad’s sister in
The Arabian Nights
, has a particular resonance for any woman writer. In the
Nights
, Shaharazad’s apparently endless stories save her life, since had her husband not wanted to hear them he could have sent her to the executioner, as he had his previous wives. While Telmissany’s narrator is not ‘writing for her life’ in the way that Shaharazad told stories for hers, the act of writing seems to function as a form of private therapy, a necessary retreat from almost overwhelming concerns. There is an obvious contrast between this kind of writing and that of al-Saadawi, with its advertised commitment to public concerns.

Other Egyptian women authors well known in translation include Alifa Rifaat and Salwa Bakr, both writers of short stories (though Bakr has recently also published a number of novels). The former, unusual because of her positioning outside the ranks of the upper
middle classes from which Egypt’s women writers mostly come, began to publish late in life following years of writing surreptitiously in defiance of strict family norms. Stories such as ‘Thursday Lunch’ or ‘Me and My Sister’ present the loneliness of lower middle-class women either caught in marriages that give them no satisfaction, as in the former, or, like the young woman in the latter, ‘sitting at home waiting for someone to come and marry her’. Rifaat’s work has attracted comment because of its exploration of sexual themes and the bitter compromises her female characters are sometimes called upon to make, such as in ‘Badriyya and Her Husband’, in which Badriyya’s husband is homosexual (‘the wife’s the last to know’), or ‘An Incident in the Ghobashi Household’, which concerns a mother, her daughter and an illegitimate child.
²⁰
Salwa Bakr, younger than Rifaat but from a similar background, has specialized in related subject matter, her stories treating the lives of women for whom, in her translator’s words, ‘politically, economically and socially life has been set in certain moulds and only with courage can one break out of them,’ if one can at all. ‘That Beautiful Undiscovered Voice’, for example, presents a middle-aged woman who discovers she has a previously undiscovered singing voice. Family circumstances oblige her to deny it. ‘The Sorrows of Desdemona’ describes the thoughts of a schoolgirl, who, trapped in a narrow family environment, finds temporary outlet for her feelings in school drama lessons, and nowhere else.
²¹

Finally, a last set of women writers has emerged in recent decades in Lebanon. One of these, Hoda Barakat, is discussed below; the best known to English-speaking readers is probably Hanan al-Shaykh, though novels by Ghada Samman have also been translated. What links these authors together is their shared experience of the Lebanese civil war, which, starting in 1975 and ending in 1990, left Lebanon devastated and much of its population in exile.
²²
It was against this background that women became ‘impatient with husbands, brothers,
sons and fathers,’ in the words of one critic, at least some of whom were caught up in the violence. Women sought to imagine ‘a society that no longer posited male ascendancy as the
sine qua non
of future co-existence’. Reflection on the war, its ‘catalytic effect’, caused such writers to ‘recognize … their previous oppression and marginalization’ and to call for the creation of ‘a transformed national consciousness’ as a result of the unravelling of Lebanese society.
²³

Al-Shaykh’s
The Story of Zahra
, for example,
²⁴
describes the life of a young woman originally from the south of Lebanon in war-torn Beirut, where she discovers that the atmosphere of fear has caused people to draw closer to each other, offering new possibilities for affective relations, and that violence has become a way of life, overwhelming human ties. Having fallen in love with a member of one of the city’s militias, Zahra’s story ends when she is imprisoned and killed by him. Al-Shaykh’s later works, including
Women of Sand and Myrrh
, a set of related short stories,
²⁵
and
Only in London
,
²⁶
present women’s lives in the Lebanese (and Arab) diaspora, the first set in an unnamed Gulf country, the latter in London. Ghada Samman’s
Beirut Nightmares
²⁷
also records a female narrator’s experience of the war, this time in some 150 short sections (‘nightmares’) that dwell on the chaos and the need to re-evaluate life in the light of it. Trapped in her flat, ‘a defenceless noncombatant in the middle of a battlefield’, she records the breakdown of normal social relations and the violence that has replaced them, together with the hardening of the barriers between the city’s communities. A young man is shot in the street in a revenge attack, ‘the only thing that mattered was that he be of a different religion’; her lover, Yousif, is ‘killed by armed men at a checkpoint. Just like that, for no reason’; a group of boys are tortured to death, their torturer later sleeping ‘as soundly as if he’d conquered five virgins, one after the other’.

These events cause the narrator, modelled on Samman, to question both the pre-war society that had given rise to them, as well as her possible implication in such events. ‘You find yourself re-examining everything and the place it’s occupied in your life … [The war] like a masterfully crafted mirror reveals to those who dare to gaze into it the flimsiness of what we call the “bond of human fellowship”.’ Is she partly responsible for the violence, having previously called for the ‘overthrow’ of existing society? Is it possible to remain ‘neutral’ in the face of such events? Whose ‘side’ is she on?