Arab Women Writers: "Are There Any?"

By Bouthaina Shaaban

At a convention of the Modern Language Association, I was introduced to an American colleague as "a scholar from Syria working on Arab women novelists." He raised his eyebrows and, with an ascending laugh, exclaimed, "Arab women novelists: Are there any?"

As one who feels she needs two lifetimes to cover only a fraction of the material available, his reaction planted two questions in my mind. I've answered one by deciding that if American readers are unaware that Arab women novelists exist at all, it is more urgent to write about Arab women novelists in English than it is in Arabic. The second question which I'm still pondering, is where to begin. The number of women who have distinguished themselves in Arabic literature from the sixth century until today is immense.

Al Khansa (575-664) was an Arab woman poet who was also a literary critic. She used to stand in that world's fair of Arabic poetry, the Okaz market in present-day Saudi Arabia, scrutinizing the work of her fellow poets, and pointing out to them the merits and demerits of their poetry. In the 14 centuries since, Arab women have been writing poetry and prose and conducting their literary salons. In such salons poets have been meeting regularly to recite their recent compositions, with the hostess (who is always a woman) as the ultimate literary judge. If the literary contributions of Arab women have not been properly recorded or fairly acknowledged, the task to do so is ours.

Even before the operation of recording Arabic literature began, it was women who conveyed the stories of oral tradition from one generation to another, keeping the heritage of Arabic storytelling alive. Poetry was for generations the most important genre in Arabic literature. The short story and the novel in their modern forms were quite late to appear, but earlier forms such as Al-Hikayya and Makamah were widely practiced.

In my own latest research I have discovered that the first novel in Arabic literature was written by a woman rather than a man, as previously assumed. Although it has been the general consensus in the Arab world that the first modern novel in Arabic literature is Zainab, by the Egyptian writer Hussayn Haykal (1914), this can only be true if we exclude women writers.

In fact, Afifa Karam, a Lebanese woman, wrote the first novel in Arabic in 1906. It was Badi'awa Fouad, published by Al-Huda newspaper (New York). Since then Arab women writers have been writing novels and short stories, but without claiming the amount of attention accorded to men writers.

Most Arab women writers began by exploring the intricacies of their lives as women, of their families, and of family relations. Until the 1950s, the concept of women's literature, as expressed by Syrian novelist Widad Sakkakini, was "the literature in which a woman writer expresses her inner feelings and subtle sensitivity in female spheres which are out of man's reach. . . Women's literature describes 'female habits and modes of thinking which no man writer, however talented he might be, could reach."'

Yet the writer who coined this limiting definition exceeded it in her own literary productions. In a style that included sharp satire and shrewd humor, Widad Sakkakini's first story collection 7he Peoples ' Mirrors, sensitively portrayed the social and psychological environment confining her sisters, and tacitly incited them to rebel against prevailing prejudices and stereotypes. The description of women's grievances is quickly channeled to a form of rebellion that finds its best expressions in her novel Arwa BintAI-Khutub (Arwa, the Daughter of Upheavals), and her biography Rabia Al-Adwiyya: First Among Sufis. In these two works the author addresses injustices inflicted on women by a man-made system.

More subtle, though no less painful, injustices are depicted by Dr. Latifa Ziat, an Egyptian woman, who discovers at an advanced age that her lifetime spent tending and mothering other peoples' feelings and thoughts has allowed no time to register her own. In her short story collection Al-Shaykhukha wa Kissas Aukhra (Old Age and Other Stories), her theme is that women's obsession with living up to the social image of themselves as faithful lovers, caring wives and selfless mothers precludes any opportunities for self-realization or self-fulfillment. Her stories are a passionate call for women to question prevailing concepts of women's happiness, success and achievement, and to redefine them according to their own personal goals and interests in life.

Since the 1960s, as the number of Arab women writers has increased dramatically in various parts of the Arab world, and among all social classes, they have reached out to embrace broader social and political issues. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, novels and short stories written by Arab women also entered a more feminist phase.

During this new phase, feminist visions, aspirations and outlooks were expressed in the works of Kulayt Khuri and Ghada Saaman in Syria, Nawal Saadawi in Egypt, Khanata Banuna in Morocco, Assia Djebar in Algeria, Sahar Khalifa and Samira Azzam from Palestine, Layla Othman from Kuwait and many more rising novelists and short story writers.

In their works, such Arab women writers have highlighted boldly the evils of political systems which, by being detrimental to women, have consequently operated to the detriment of men and of society at large. In her novel Beirut 75, for example, Ghada Saaman highlights the alienation visited upon both men and women by the social and political systems in Lebanon. Her message, however, is that amidst such unfathomable chaos women are, by far, the worst afflicted. They suffer from the double subjection of society and of men.

What is more, this new generation of feminist writers has illuminated women's strengths and dispelled deeply entrenched taboos about their weaknesses. The new woman that emerges in Sahar Khalifa's two-part novel, Al Saabar and Abad Al-Shams defies and dissociates herself totally from two traditional concepts of women. The first is that women are weak and unable to maintain a family after the disappearance of its male provider. The second is the entrenched view of women's honor, which had disastrous repercussions on the fate of the Palestinian people in 1948. From the author's brilliantly interwoven depiction of the social matrix of Palestinian society in the occupied territory, a new, confident and creative Arab woman emerges who breaks all stereotypes of women's weakness or inferiority.

Such women authors not only are recording the changes in challenged societies, they are a catalyst for this century's dynamic response.

Bouthaina Shaaban, Ph.D., is an associate professor of English literature and women's studies at Damascus University. Her book Both Right and Left Handed was published in 1992 by Indiana University Press.

Palestinian Women Writers Evoke Their Country

By Suha Sabbagh

Whether they write in English or in Arabic, Palestinian women writers living in exile recreate Palestine within the folds of their novels. The images from the nostalgic recollections of the writers convey a haven of warmth and a sense of belonging to a secure past. Against these images, from the harsh realities of exile are depicted the contemporary problems facing the dislodged Palestinian population. In writing of the agonies of separation and loss, Palestinian women authors living in exile convey an even greater anxiety than do writers in the occupied territories. Diaspora writers almost invariably compensate for their loss by recreating Palestine in prose.

Each author also draws on her own experiences to present the problems facing the exiles of the Palestinian diaspora. After fleeing Palestine in 1948, Samira Azzam drew on her life in Beirut to describe, in two volumes of short stories, the struggle for dignity in the face of mounting difficulties in earning a living in neighboring Arab countries. She also vividly describes the agony of a mother and daughter separated by the new borders formed in 1948.

Hala Jabbour, currently living in Washington, DC, describes in Woman of Nazareth the life of a modern Palestinian woman torn between her loyalty to her family and her desire to emancipate herself from patriarchal control. Jabbour concludes that while Palestinian women are capable of overcoming patriarchy, they will not lead normal productive lives as long as their national problem remains unsolved.

A new literary star born in Jerusalem before 1948, Soraya Antonius, seeks in two novels in English to present the sweep of events that led to the destruction of Palestine, from creation of the British Mandate as a result of World War I to the fighting that followed the U.N. partition resolution and creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The Lord, published in 1986, deals with the life of the local magician, Tareq, an Arab nationalist hanged by the British on the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice. His life forms a parallel with the life and suffering of a Palestinian predecessor, Jesus of Nazareth. The underlying Christian theme brings out the irony and the brutality of the colonial mission by Christian Britain.

Her second novel, Where the Jinn Consult, published one year later in 1987, covers the period from the Palestinian peasant rebellion against the British in 1936, through the Second World War in Europe, up to the 1948 defeat and dispersal of the indigenous Palestinian population. The book takes its title from the name given to the courtyard of the sultan's palace, where assassinations of rival princes who might challenge the throne were plotted. The title's symbolism is not limited to the plotting against Palestine through the UK's Balfour Declaration and later the U.S. abetted partition plan. It also includes colonial policies which sought to exploit local vulnerabilities, such as the concept of "female honor, " to discredit indigenous leaders, like those exploited by present-day Israel during the Palestinian uprising.

Like the magician Tareq in her first novel, Soraya Antonius conjures up villages in Palestine through a vivid style conveying color, smell and texture. Then she makes this world disappear again into the folds of history with her description of the 1948 devastations of homes, villages and lives.

For brief moments, however, readers experience life in Jaffa in 1917, in the days prior to refrigeration when preservation of food for the winter months required much skill. The modern reader is introduced to customs of villages that long ago ceased to exist.

Antonius also captures, as if in a wax museum, dinner parties of the educated elites in Jerusalem, torn between their desire to be sovereign in their own country and their pride in assimilation of European culture. Meanwhile, as she narrates all this, conditions are slowly progressing toward an all-out confrontation with the British. It is precisely her ability to evoke rather than flatly describe those times that brings pre-1948 Palestine back to life.

The author is a social historian par excellence. Plot and characters are subordinated to the novel's task of portraying the effects of the unfolding historical developments on characters from the social elite, on a group of intellectuals associated with a magazine called the Camel's Hump, and on the peasant population.

In the second Antonius novel, Violet Dhaishi, a chic society woman who measures success by the degree of assimilation into British culture, is in pursuit of a treasured brooch and a discarded British lover when she miraculously escapes death as the wing of the King David Hotel to which she is headed is blown up by Jewish extremists. The author's technique consists of placing well-known historical events that have long since lost their ability to shock into the daily routines of her characters. In so doing, she forces the reader to think about and re-evaluate the internal and external history that undid her nation.

If the local population is faulted, it is for feeling too secure in the face of signs of the catastrophe to come. For the peasants, the essence of that security derived from having lived for generations on the land. Abu-Ramzi cannot understand why his son has joined the uprising instead of tilling the earth. The argument that the land can be usurped seems absurd to the father: "It [the land] cannot tee killed, like a sheep. It can't be driven to the desert, like a camel. And not even the British can put it in their suitcases and sail."

The reader learns also through Antonius' language of the cultural perspectives that governed gender relations and patriarchal norms: "Hadil, as docile as though obeying a man, dropped her bundle and the two women [mother and daughter] left by the back lane, through the fields and the long dusty road to Lydda. "

Antonius, in one sentence, illuminates gender relations, the ideal of female docility, the strength of some mothers, and respect for parents and for old age. It is to be hoped that Soraya Antonius, whose chronicle of 30 years explains so much of the history that led to the tragedy of the Palestinians, will now turn her talents to the wisdom of exile that, if properly absorbed, can lead to their restoration.

Suha Sabbagh, Ph. D., is executive director of the Institute for Arab Women's Studies in Washington, DC.