CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMENS WRITING (Postcolonial Literature)

Contemporary Arab Women Writers

This book engages with contemporary Arab women writers from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Algeria. In spite of Edward Said’s groundbreaking reappraisal of the uneven relationship between the West and the Arab world in Orientalism, there has been little postcolonial criticism of Arab writing. Anastasia Valassopoulos raises the profile of Arab women writers by examining how they negotiate contexts and experiences that have come to be identified with postcoloniality such as the preoccupation with Western feminism, political conflict and war, the social effects of non-conformity and female empowerment, and the negotiation of influential cultural discourses such as orientalism. Contemporary Arab Women Writers revitalises theoretical concepts associated with feminism, gender studies and cultural studies, and explores how art history, popular culture, translation studies, psychoanalysis and news media all offer productive ways to associate with Arab women’s writing that work beyond a limiting socio-historical context. Discussing the writings of authors including Ahdaf Soueif, Nawal El Saadawi, Leila Sebbar, Liana Badr and Hanan AlShaykh, this book represents a new direction in postcolonial literary criticism that transcends constrictive monothematic approaches. Anastasia Valassopoulos lectures on World Literatures at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of articles on Arab women writers, Tunisian film, Egyptian and Algerian popular culture, and has also written on the Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi.

Postcolonial Literature

Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonised areas, and will include material from nonanglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. The series will also include collections of important essays from older journals, and re-issues of classic texts on postcolonial subjects. Routledge is pleased to invite proposals for new books in the series. Interested authors should contact Lyn Innes or Rod Edmond at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, or Routledge’s Commissioning Editor for Literature. The series comprises three strands. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures is a forum for innovative new research intended for a specialist readership. Published in hardback, titles include: 1. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye by Brenda Cooper 2. The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan 3. Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style by Denise deCaires Narain 4. African Literature, Animism and Politics by Caroline Rooney 5. Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition by Tobias Do¨ring 6. Islands in History and Representation edited by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith 7. Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India, 1822–1922 by Anindyo Roy 8. Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: ‘A Hot Place, Belonging To Us’ by Evelyn O’Callaghan 9. Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the body by Michelle Keown 10. Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction by Sue Kossew 11. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence by Priyamvada Gopal 12. Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire by Terry Collits 13. American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination by Paul Lyons 14. Decolonizing Culture in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction by Susan Y. Najita 15. Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place by Minoli Salgado 16. Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary by Vijay Mishra 17. Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English by Neelam Srivastava 18. English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics by Pramod K. Nayar 19. Decolonising Gender: Literature, Enlightenment and the Feminine Real by Caroline Rooney 20. Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography by David Huddart 21. Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context by Anastasia Valassopoulos

Postcolonial Literatures makes available in paperback important work in the field. Hardback editions of these titles are also available, some published earlier in the Routledge Research strand of the series. Titles in paperback include: Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique by Benita Parry Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye by Brenda Cooper The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style by Denise deCaires Narain

Readings in Postcolonial Literatures offers collections of important essays from journals or classic texts in the field. Titles include: 1. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris edited by Andrew Bundy

Contemporary Arab Women Writers Cultural expression in context

Anastasia Valassopoulos

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa businness This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

# 2007 Anastasia Valassopoulos All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Valassopoulos, Anastasia, 1973Contemporary Arab women writers : cultural expression in context / Anastasia Valassopoulos. p. cm. – (Postcolonial literatures) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Arabic literature–Women authors–History and criticism. 2. Women authors, Arab. I. Title. PJ7525.2.V35 2007 892.709’92870905–dc22 2007018407 ISBN 0-203-30709-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN: 978-0-415-35355-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-30709-0 (ebk)

In memory of my uncles Iskandar Abu Abdullah and Albert Abu Abdullah who left us too soon

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on transliteration

1

xi xii

Introduction

1

Women, not heroines or icons of modernity

8

Beginnings 8 Arab feminism 13 Western cultural exports in Arab social thought 16 Feminist postcolonial theory and Arab representation 21 2

Again: Nawal El Saadawi From medicine to politics to fiction El Saadawi’s avowals 38 Early novels 40 And they die of desire for us 52

3

31 31

Danger and creativity: Lebanese war novelists

55

War stories 57 How to write war? 60 Hanan Al-Shaykh: what’s love got to do with it? 64 Survival or bust: Al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues and Ghoussoub’s Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within 68 Concerned outsiders: what do they care? 72 Bride martyrs and servant heroines 75 4

The Garnet series: translations Translation and rewriting 85 Pain, suffering and ideology: the ‘Palestinian’ novels 92 ‘There are crimes of conscience which human laws fail to rectify’: Bakr’s The Golden Chariot 102 Mothballs or Napthalene? 109

85

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Contemporary Arab women writers

5

Ahlam Mosteghanemi and Ahdaf Soueif: ‘physical textures’ and ‘exceptional events’

111

I love you Algeria: Mosteghanemi’s Memory in the Flesh 111 Against hybridity and towards a concept of becoming: Soueif ’s In the Eye of the Sun 124 6

Re-exoticising the Orient

133

A phantom heritage 134 Popular revisions: harems and more harems 140 Exoticism? The feeling which ‘Diversity stirs in us’: Djebar’s ‘Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound’ in Women of Algiers in their Apartment and Sebbar’s Sherazade 142 Notes Index

155 175

Acknowledgements

I would firstly like to thank all of the Arab women authors who continue to write, publish and inspire. This is a small token of appreciation for your work. I am grateful to Rodopi and the Copyright Clearance Centre for permission to reprint parts of ‘The Legacy of Orientalism in Middle Eastern Feminism’. It first appeared in the edited collection After Orientalism. Sadly, the splendid editor, Inge Boer, has since passed away and I dedicate Chapter 6 to her memory. I would very much like to thank the University of Kent, where I tested out many of the ideas that finally made their way into this book. In particular, I want to thank Lyn Innes, Caroline Rooney, Rod Edmond and Abdulrazak Gurnah for their support and advice throughout many years. The friends that I made at Kent are very precious and I would like to thank them all very much always; Alex Arlango, Antony Barron, Claire Bartram, Pari Cornford, Dave Cummings, Brian Dillon, Iman Haman, Felicity Dunworth, Furrukh Khan, Gearoid O’Flaherty, Tom Panagiotopoulos, Lia Peristiani, Eleni Skoura, Tina Sherwell and Tiffany Weir. To Maggie Awadalla and Rana Dayoub I owe great thanks for co-organising a unique conference in 1999 – and for taking Nawal El Saadawi to Canterbury Cathedral. To my friend Mary Dimopoulos, for the many years of friendship, thank you. I am grateful to the University of Manchester for a sabbatical semester during which I was able to finish this book. To all my students, from whom I have learnt much, many, many thanks. My colleagues at Manchester, both present and past, have all been very supportive and I thank them all. I am deeply appreciative of the following for their endless encouragement, humour and generosity of spirit: Anke Bernau, Daniela Caselli, Laura Doan, Becky Munford, Eithne Quinn and Anindita Ghosh. I would like to thank the staff at Routledge for their support and patience and I am particularly grateful to Liz Thompson, Polly Dodson and Paola Celli. I would also like to thank Jo Whiting for his initial encouragement. To Denise deCaires Narain and Jan Montefiore I owe many thanks for reading earlier versions of some of the work that appears here. Much gratitude goes to my family, Alberta and George Valassopoulos, Angela and Eddy who have always been supportive of my choices. Finally, I wish to thank Rob Duggan for his endless patience, care, faith and love; he in return has all my admiration.

Note on transliteration

Contemporary names and places are spelled out as they are found in standard Western publications (for example Nawal El Saadawi rather than Nawaˆl alSa’daˆwıˆ). In quoted materials, I have preserved existing spellings, even when they differ from the transliteration system used here.

Introduction

None of the many books mentioned in these pages has truly seized the imagination of the people in the way that the songs of Oum Khalthoum or Feyrouz do. (Kaye and Zoubir, The Ambiguous Compromise)

In 2000, I read an article by Amal Amireh that has influenced me ever since. Amireh appealed for a ‘vigorous critical discussion about Arabic literature and culture in the West’ that ‘should go beyond ‘‘appreciative’’ criticism that condescendingly praises Arab women writers for ‘‘daring’’ to put pen to paper’.1 Ultimately, Amireh argued, we need more ‘serious debates about fiction [to] remind readers that they are reading not documentaries, but ‘‘literature,’’ which draws on particular conventions and emerges from specific traditions’.2 It seemed to me then that although Amireh had written these words back in 1996, there was still very little criticism available of the type that she envisaged. Though certain secondary sources did exist, as Majaj, Sunderman and Saliba noted in their introduction to their 2002 collection Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, these did not ‘fully reflect either the availability of this literature or its significance’.3 Their collection in fact was the first successful attempt to put into practice Amireh’s vision. Here, a wide range of Arab women writers from Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Algeria received critical treatment and genuine engagement. It is with this book in mind that I set out to build on the principle of active negotiation with Arab women’s writing. Zed books is currently re-issuing three works by Nawal El Saadawi with new introductions. This development leaves me in no doubt that more excellent work on Arab women writers is right around the corner and that we are perhaps entering a new phase of criticism. Certainly the introduction of two new journals on the publishing scene, Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World and the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, alongside the wellestablished Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arabic Literature and Journal of Arabic Literature among others, has brought a much-needed specialist focus in English on issues that concern the production and dissemination of knowledge and criticism on the Arab world. I also want to acknowledge the growing field of translation and distribution of Arab women’s literature. Specifically, Syracuse University Press’s ‘Middle East Literature in Translation’ series has made available much work in

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Contemporary Arab women writers

translation, such as Hoda Barakat’s Disciples of Passion (translated by Marilyn Booth), Radwa Ashour’s Granada: A Novel (translated by William Granara) and Nadia Tue´ni’s Lebanon: Poems of Love and War (translated by Paul B. Kelley and Sam Hazo).4 The American University in Cairo Press has made available a wealth of excellent material. In particular, their Modern Arabic Writing series showcases work by Hala El Badry, Ahlem Mosteghanemi, Betool Khediari, Randa Ghazy, Somaya Ramadan, Leila Abouzeid and Buthaina Al Nasiri among others. This is testimony not only to the creativity and productivity of Arab women writers but to the commitment by publishers to produce and distribute their work. The recent Manchester Festival of Palestinian Literature (13– 15 October 2006, the first of its kind in the UK), where internationally renowned Palestinian writers and intellectuals congregated, is testimony to this commitment. It is of course with regret that it was not possible to incorporate work on more writers than I have. I read and studied with interest and enthusiasm the work of Sahar Khalifeh, Latifa Zayyat, Faı¨za Gue`ne, Leila Aboulela, Leila AlAtrash and others. In the end, I had to make a choice and the chapters that follow are the result of that choice. In the case of Assia Djebar in particular (on whom I reflect very briefly), I felt that much illuminating and sophisticated critical work was already being done. My overall aim with this particular book was to revisit some established authors, such as Hoda Barakat, Assia Djebar, Mai Ghoussoub, Nawal El Saadawi, Hanan Al-Shaykh, and Ahdaf Soueif, whilst also profiling some less-established in criticism in English such as Liana Badr, Hamida Na’na, Ahlem Mosteghanemi and Leila Sebbar. This has allowed me to return to authors whose work is well known outside of the Arab world and to interpret their work alongside authors whose work has attracted far less attention. My decision to work on novels rather than drama, poetry and short stories is due in part to the fact that the novel form currently seems to be the most popular and therefore, I felt, more representative of literary production. I chose for various reasons to write on works translated into English (from Arabic and French). One was that I felt that there was a need to write about material that readers consulting this book could then go back to, reflect on and engage with. Another is that I am concerned with the visibility of these works in the public sphere and wanted to actively participate in promoting them. The final reason is simple. I did not want to engage with material on which I would have the last word. I write in the spirit of transcultural and transnational communication, and if a work has been translated and is readily available, then I invite a community of readers to participate openly in its interpretation. As this book reveals, my choices were not guided by location but by issues of theme and form. In many ways, I hoped to balance the need to burden the reader with socio-historical material by combining this with a critical context. I have avoided explicit reference to questions of faith and ethnicity, not because I do not consider these to be significant but because it is my understanding that these issues may come to dominate the discussion on Arab women’s literary production. Nevertheless, there are new ways of approaching these issues, as

Introduction

3

Lindsey Moore’s forthcoming Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature, Suzanne Gauch’s Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism and Islam and Brinda Mehta’s Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing show. My decision not to go down this route stems from my desire to engage with the material in the form of a gesture; a gesture towards the merit of these works in their capacity to benefit, participate and inform contemporary literary criticism and theory. My aim for this book was to offer a broad and comprehensive critical coverage for Arab women writers. I want to show how feminist, queer, postcolonial and cultural theories can all play a part in the negotiation of these texts. Specifically, I refer to visual culture and other forms of popular culture in the Arab world that can contribute towards our engagement with Arab women writers. Popular culture holds a very central place in Arab culture, and literature is more often than not reacting to or negotiating different forms of popular culture. Though I hope to work on this in more detail in the future, I have here indicated ways in which it could be very productive. I feel strongly that when we try to ‘translate’ or interpret another culture, it is not enough to provide a sociopolitical context. Forms of culture that persons engage with daily, such as other literature, music, posters, films, art and magazines, though they are doubtlessly formed and produced within a politicised context, nevertheless elicit a more immediate effect. Engagements with these forms of culture can only enrich a contextual understanding of the texts we read. Where Amireh writes that Arab women’s literature is not ‘documentary’, this rings very clearly in my mind, for the core issue of representation is often left by the wayside in a discussion of Arab women’s cultural production. I am not speaking here of inaccuracies but of a reluctance to study and interpret the writing alongside a tradition of criticism that we seem to be accustomed to performing with other literary traditions. I have attempted to foreground this in the chapters that follow. Chapter 1 concentrates on debates surrounding the reception and subsequent critique of Arab women’s writing. It also sets out to address the relationship between Arab feminism and cultural production. Here, I discuss the inevitable feminist framework that has taken precedence, though I argue that this is no longer the strategy of choice for many critics. Through a discussion of Arab feminism, Arab social thought and feminist postcolonial theory, I show how possibilities of engagement have opened up new ways of reading. Here, I participate in wider issues around the notion of influence and social responsibility. Postcolonial theory, then, seems an apt (both geographically and historically) and relevant tool with which to investigate certain experiences in Arab women’s writing not only to do with the much-debated issues of dislocation and hybridisation but also with the discourses of modernity and cultural influence. I argue that it is possible to conceive of many productive contexts within which to study and analyse contemporary Arab women’s writing without recourse to tried and tested feminist methods. Where feminist methods are foregrounded, I suggest a nuanced approach that listens to the text and avoids imposing a political or social meaning where it seems to resist this. In general, I show that it is critically

4

Contemporary Arab women writers

stifling to assume that Arab women’s writing only has one thing to offer: an affirmation of oppression. Read critically, many of the works that I discuss reveal a deep-seated mistrust of any foreclosing arguments that would seek to predetermine their meaning. The history of reception of Arab women’s writing is often troubling and quick to provide easy answers. Where more recent criticism has been successful is the ways in which it has opened up the approach towards this material. Where some critics are more comfortable with providing rigorous socio-historical contexts, others are keener to foreground a cultural one. Either way, both of these directions can only enrich the critical reception of some very interesting and admirable writing. Reading Arab women’s writing, because of and despite the difficulty surrounding its reception, is the challenge. These texts should be read for their experiences of location, cultural influence, the expression of national identity, the experience of sexuality, the performance of gender roles and the interrogation of and responses to colonial discourse and postcolonial theory. It is within these broad parameters that the most productive and enlightening negotiation can take place. In Chapter 2 I argue for a transcultural and transational potential (with all its problems) located within the early work of Nawal El Saadawi, prominent Egyptian activist, social critic, doctor and, more significantly for this book, writer. I am here interested in El Saadawi’s potential to construct characters that awaken to the paradoxes inherent in the social and cultural institutions that produce them. I admire El Saadawi’s fiction for its participation in a call for a universal site for female emancipation. Through this, I believe, El Saadawi creates a human dignity – which should be universal – especially for women; she offers a way of humanising women as women through their own terms and definitions. I argue that much of El Saadawi’s work is open to broad interpretation and can be used to demonstrate the potential for a universal feminism that seeks these spaces of experience from which to construct a ‘universal’ or global discourse on women. In Chapter 3 I concentrate on writing on the Lebanese war in general and on the work of Hanan Al-Shaykh and Mai Ghoussoub in particular. I argue that critical writing on war representations need not always reach out for politically reassuring interpretations. Very often, women writers who tackle the subject of war are keen to represent a host of reactions, coping mechanisms and new forms of negotiation. Although writing may be primarily an act of non-violent resistance, the themes tackled by Al-Shaykh and Ghoussoub encourage an entirely new and dynamic direction in criticism. I here offer readings that argue for the recognition that war opens up new spaces for the understanding of how gender is socially configured. In seeking to understand regulatory norms that are created during a situation of war, I show how these norms reflect the experiences undergone. Here, sexual and militant resistance is understood as paving a way for understanding oneself and one’s capabilities. The situation of war blurs and redefines ideas of reality, and actions undertaken during situations of conflict are understood productively rather than negatively. I argue that the circumstances of war are unique in that they may allow women to manipulate their own experiences in order to understand themselves as

Introduction

5

women and to re-interpret what they are capable of outside of the norms that govern societies in peacetime. Importantly, it is with the destruction of the old social fabric that women may achieve a liberation of their desire. In this chapter, I emphasise that we cannot always take a simple anti-war view if we are to reveal the contradictions at work in any given text. The examination of the war narratives shows that certain events within the narratives are themselves often controversial and do not fit into a comfortable feminist framework that may seek to align women as agents of passive resistance. Here, women are represented as capable of cruelty and sacrifice, selfishness and selflessness. To confront these events as possible and probable is to give women an active role in the understanding of their position in the situation that is war. In Chapter 4 I discuss the ambitious Garnet ‘Arab Women Writers’ series. This project promoted the translation and publication of Arab women novelists that reflected on the concerns and issues permeating contemporary Arab women’s writing such as the experience of war, political conflict, the decision to be active or passive in struggles, views towards domesticity and marriage as well as the internalisation of conflict experienced within the family and the homeland. Here, I present arguments around the broad concept of literary translation of the novels in the series. My analysis of the contexts surrounding the production of these books illuminates wider debates within the reception of Arab women writers, highlights the different expectations from academics working in the field and demonstrates how translators themselves became involved in the debates. I argue that the issue of translation is a sensitive one, in particular when texts framed as ‘feminist’ are being translated. Here I suggest that the ‘translator-effect’ can become part of an effective strategy in translation. I conclude that Faqir’s aims as editor seem incompatible with the approaches of critics who have varying expectations based on linguistic or political preference, and that this series can only impartially be evaluated through a close analysis of both the events fictionalised and described and the extent to which language enables us to participate in the debates disclosed. In order to assess the lasting value of this series as an introductory point into Arab women’s writing, it is necessary to explore how they each internally impart locale as well as an engagement with broad issues that makes it very difficult to homogenise their target audience, particularly in translation. Though I explore the possibility that the relationship of these novels to each other is purely incidental, I will argue that nevertheless, their formation as a focal point (in Britain at least) of Arab women’s writing in the 1990s marks them as somehow indicative or designative of Arab women’s issues. The rest of this chapter offers an analysis of the work of Liana Badr, Hamida Na’na and Salwa Bakr, with a brief look at Alia Mamdouh’s Mothballs. Chapter 5 takes a very close look at Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s 1985 novel Memory in the Flesh and Ahdaf Soueif ’s 1992 novel In the Eye of the Sun. My aim here is to show how these two novels enact ways in which the political and social are mediated, lived, performed and experienced through the personal. I have chosen to concentrate on these two novels as they expose a certain level of introspection that specifically allows for an exploration of how personal lives and

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Contemporary Arab women writers

sentiments are influenced by wider demands and how these demands, be they political or social, determine personal experience. In my discussion of the two novels, I argue against any predetermined interpretation of texts, even if this predetermination seeks to foreground seemingly progressive associations. For example, I claim that it is not always necessary to praise a work for its will towards hybridity or to criticise a book because it fails to represent positive images of women. My intention is to show how literary texts often confound, exceed and call into question theoretical suppositions. Here, I argue for readings that are determined by the text rather than for the texts. It is important, for example, to distinguish and engage with the fact that Memory of the Flesh and In the Eye of the Sun invest heavily in an idea of love, and how the experience of love, in turn, is notoriously difficult to compartmentalise, critique and most of all, narrate. In my final chapter, I look at the novels Women of Algiers in their Apartment by Assia Djebar and Sherazade, the first novel in Leila Sebbar’s Sherazade trilogy, and discuss their exploration of orientalist practice. In particular, I am interested in the way that they approach orientalist art in their work and the importance that they accord it. Specifically, I investigate whether it is possible to argue that through re-establishing the concept of exoticism as an enabling framework towards an experience of diversity, Sebbar and Djebar are able to participate in orientalist discourse. I think that this move allows them to interrogate the discourse from within whilst simultaneously immersing themselves in it. The novels will be also be examined in light of what they have to offer an expanding Arab women’s literature in terms of historical revisionism and direct political intervention, and, most significantly, what they tell us about the internalisation of a colonialist legacy that sometimes appears etched in the unconscious of the text. I think that the quantity of translated novels, short stories, poetry collections and anthologies available now makes it impossible to state that Arab women’s writing is underrepresented. If one is interested and looks (not too hard), there is much great work out there. Three recent anthologies, Arab Women Writers: An Anthology of Short Stories,5 Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women6 and Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology,7 testify to this. These works, alongside more innovative creations such as Zeina Abirached’s graphic novels8 and Leila Sebbar’s contribution to Femmes D’Afrique du Nord: Cartes Postales (1885–1930)9 among her other works that combine visual art and text, all pave the way for rich critical interpretations. In addition to this, a wave of writing from the Arab diaspora has begun to receive much attention. Among these are novels by Diana Abu-Jaber, Samia Serageldin and Laila Halaby as well as the poetry of Suheir Hammad and Elmaz Abinader, whose works have been well received in the USA. A growing body of criticism is beginning to emerge around these writers that, although still modest, has the potential to become very significant. Most importantly, though, I would like to end with a thought that expresses my personal involvement in this project. Maysa Abou-Youssef Hayward, in her introduction to a special issue of Studies in the Humanities on ‘Arabic literature in translation and Arab diasporic writing’, writes:

Introduction

7

How did we get to this place where the Arab identity is so much that of the Other? How did the boundaries between East and West, as well as boundaries between various countries in the East become so rigid? It has not always been so. In the past, for example, in the years up through the early 1970s, those in the Arab world felt close to the West and felt a sense of shared identity with one another as well. Cairo, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad all seemed very western cities, and literary salons in those capitals were as well aware of Western writers as they were of writers from the Arab world. But somewhere along the way, these conversations ceased. This volume . . . seeks to initiate some long postponed dialogue.10 In the spirit of dialogue then, let us begin . . .

1

Women, not heroines or icons of modernity1

Beginnings2 Here, I would like to sketch out the ways in which Arab women’s writing has been critiqued, discussed and engaged with in order to map out where we are now in terms of current debates, modes and approaches to reading contemporary writing. Rather than assume the prominence and inevitability of a feminist approach, I want to outline the varying concerns of several key critics in this area, and then trace the eventual and perhaps predictable development of a feminist methodology used to critique Arab women’s writing. My aim is not to reveal that a certain critical response has facilitated the emergence of a particular framework; this would be too uncomplicated. Rather, I will explore the diverse ways in which critical contexts herald literary productions. A 1997 article by Amal Amireh posed crucial questions of how best to approach the field of Arab women’s studies more generally. She argues that ‘despite new developments in feminist scholarship, obsolete paradigms and categories of analysis persist and even dominate when the subject of study is Arab women’.3 While I do acknowledge this tendency and intend to tackle it, I here want to begin by looking at how critical discussions of Arab women’s writing have been conducted, at what point these ‘obsolete paradigms and categories of analysis’ emerge and what these new ‘developments in feminist scholarship’ are that permit us to move forward. I have often wondered to what extent these paradigms were seen to be necessary in order to facilitate a debate that had no precedent and was therefore destined to be mired in preconceptions and prefigured attitudes. Whether or not certain methods and approaches to critiquing and presenting Arab women writers arose out of an uncertainty or concern about how the topic would be received by the wider critical community is a question that interests me. Feminism as an academic and public discourse, with its occasional focus on political action, perhaps provided a legitimising and authenticating set of communicative tools and language with which to discuss Arab women’s writing.4 Discussing the writing in a feminist frame may have facilitated the foregrounding of women’s issues and indeed provided a legitimate platform for many early critical responses. Nevertheless, investigating how a predominantly fixed and unproblematic understanding of feminist (and sometimes

Women, not heroines or icons of modernity

9

nationalist) hypotheses came to the fore in the first critical responses to Arab women’s writing and how these were later challenged or reproduced in critical works and anthologies will give us a clearer picture of how the reaction to Arab women’s writing has been articulated and made intelligible. Joseph Zeidan’s 1995 work Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond was one of the first critical works to group together and discuss Arab women writers. Here Zeidan remarks positively on the increase in demand for, production and distribution of Arab women’s writing. A similar observation, made in 2002 in Majaj et al.’s introduction to Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, addresses the pressing need for good translations. Clearly, visibility was, for many years, a primary concern for those working in the field of Arab literature.5 Whilst maintaining a keen eye on production contexts, critics such as Zeidan began framing their discussions on Arab women novelists (in particular) in terms of a ‘challenge’ to ‘patriarchal language that marginalizes’ women, placing Arab women’s writing, at the outset, in opposition to a monolithic opponent.6 This argument was later reinforced by Fadia Faqir in her 1994–96 introductions to the novels translated for the Garnet Arab Women Writers series.7 Though Faqir and Zeidan foreground the linguistic constraint under which Arab women writers have had to work: namely that of choosing between forms of Arabic – Classical Arabic over colloquial (and variations within this colloquial) – in their writing, their focus is also, clearly, on the patriarchal constraints emphasised and strengthened through discourse. This oppositon informed much of the early critical work on Arab women’s writing. Critical works such as Evelyn Accad’s Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East, for example, squarely evaluated women’s literary accomplishments through their capacity to successfully overcome or uncover struggles based on gender difference (though what constitutes success remains debatable). Although these approaches are to be respected for wanting to uncover and marginalise patriarchal discourses, they may to a questionable extent create an inevitable ranking of works in terms of how well they perform as ‘feminist’ or ‘nationalist’ texts.8 In certain circumstances, an over-reliance on a particular feminist framework (outlined below) has in fact stalled the project of profiling Arab women writers; for it has set up truisms that are difficult, for those not fully immersed or confident in their approach to Arab culture, to counter or rebuff. Satisfying axioms persist, and they persist because they are practical and efficient and correspond to a liberal humanism that does not always call upon broader contextual and critical (rather than just historical) detail. I argue that attention to the multiple directions of current feminist and gender theory has the capacity both to be beneficial and to benefit from a committed look at Arab women’s writing as it participates in numerous discourses and contexts. Works such as Zeidan’s Arab Women Novelists, Miriam Cooke’s Women and the War Story and Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s Men, Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics set up very particular feminist frameworks that fictional events are measured against, to varying degrees, in the actual analyses.9 Often

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in Zeidan we find Western feminist theory described unproblematically as a coherent set of ideas performing particular functions that can, with care, be transported to diverse contexts. The arguments, disagreements and debates within Western feminist theory (mainly articulated through the rise of gender theory, third-wave feminism and post-feminism) are not voiced: ‘I still believe that there is a tremendous risk involved in applying Western feminist theories and critical concepts to Arab women’s literature,’ writes Zeidan, not differentiating, however, between and among feminist theories and simultaneously undermining the literature that in many cases speaks to and is in dialogue with many of these theories.10 It seems over-conservative for us to assume that Arab women writers are not themselves involved in local and global debates on feminist issues and that their outlooks do not reflect these involvements. Individual authors’ expressions of ‘individualism’ and ‘freedom’, are, for example, often viewed as feminist due to the presumed generic association of these concepts, in the Arab world, with the West. Where Zeidan argues that ‘‘‘individualistic’’ works by Arab women can be read as feminist in the context of Arab culture’ since, ‘in that culture, collective ethnic and religious identityconformity behaviours are highly valued by the power structure . . . ’,11 I find that this individualism is not incompatible with local considerations of the meaning of freedom and the role of the individual. Though I understand and to an extent agree that Arab women writers have had to fight hard to gain recognition as artists, this in and of itself is not so varied from their Western counterparts. What a feminist framework within which we can read these works can achieve is to bestow value on hitherto undervalued subject matter, including motherhood, domesticity and other forms of public and political engagement.12 When Miriam Cooke states that early Egyptian feminists were ‘house angels who knew no other discourse than that of prudery and restraint with an occasional outburst at injustices so blatant as to overcome a well-honed sense of decorum’, she undermines principles of feminist thinkers who demarcate the significance of action in terms of the contextual restraints that perpetrators must overcome.13 Maintaining an overtly fixed sense of ‘feminist’ without attention to context dilutes subversive or participatory potential. In discussing Laila Usairan’s novel The Line of the Snake, which engages with women’s roles in the Palestinian conflict, Zeidan comments on the treatment of one of the female characters: And yet this Umm Yusuf who is being so admiringly described has once boasted that, in her role as midwife, she brought only male babies into the world . . . hardly the epitome of a progressive character. Of course, the implication here is that Umm Yusuf has brought many fighters into the world to help liberate Palestine; but this uncovers one of the major problems in women’s novels concerning the issues of national identity and liberation, which is that these are often dealt with at the expense of feminist concerns. (My emphasis)14

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This example prioritises unspecified ‘feminist concerns’ over issues of survival that could also be interpreted as feminist. Umm Yusuf ’s claims could be seen as playing up to expectations in a gesture of self-preservation, or alternatively providing sons for the Palestinian cause could also be figured as a feminist act. Instead, conceptualisations of progress and development are divorced from the difficult circumstances described in the novel. I am reminded here of Denise Riley’s significant assertions in her well-known essay ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism has intermittently been as vexed with the urgency of disengaging from the category ‘women’ as it has with laying claim to it; twentieth-century European feminism has been constitutionally torn between fighting against over-feminisation and against under-feminisation, especially where social policies have been at stake . . . So the precise specifying of ‘women’ for feminism might well mean occasionally forgetting them – or remembering them more accurately by refusing to enter into the terms of some public invocation. At times feminism might have nothing to say on the subject of ‘women’ – when their excessive identification would swallow any opposition, engulfing it hopelessly.15 What is seemingly an engaging gesture (wanting to mourn the lack of a particular feminist drive) can quickly become a totalising and, at the same time, an exclusionary manoeuvre. Seeking to define feminist moments against particular roles that women have participated through in public life (such as that of a midwife) leaves us in dangerous territory where ‘feminist’ concerns are those understood as individualistic or preoccupied with specific ideas surrounding the self. Miriam Cooke’s use of Carol Gilligan performs similar paradoxes. Discussing another of Laila Usairan’s novels, Usta’s Citadel set during the Lebanese civil war, Cooke uses Carol Gilligan to make a point about the dangers of expressing individual needs in her discussion of Maryam, one of the protagonists (I here include Cooke’s use of Gilligan): Maryam had to strike the balance between concern with individual survival, which is essentially selfish, and responsibility or caring, which may annihilate the individual’s sense of self. In A Different Voice, Gilligan writes of the dangers of: ‘a responsiveness to others that impedes a recognition of self. The truths of relationship . . . return in the discovery of connection, in the realization that self and other are interdependent and life, however valuable in itself, can only be sustained in relationships.’16 This is a very idiosyncratic interpretation of Gilligan, who, in A Different Voice, argues for what constitutes a viable and workable sense of justice. Caring for oneself does not preclude caring for others although, in Cooke’s analysis, this is posited as a move towards individualism and freedom from the responsibility of caring for others. Gilligan speaks specifically of the satisfaction and

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Contemporary Arab women writers

understanding that is available to women through the act of caring, that brings with it a broader sense of justice: Since the reality of connection is experienced by women as given rather than as freely contracted, they arrive at an understanding of life that reflects the limits of autonomy and control. As a result, women’s development delineates the path not only to a less violent life but also to a maturity realized through interdependence and taking care. (My emphasis)17 In seeking to hastily point to the failure of fictional characters to fulfil certain ‘feminist’ (read liberatory) efforts, other potentially feminist moments are missed. Gilligan’s support for an ‘ethics of care [that] rests on the premise of nonviolence’ offers the potential for activism within difficult contexts where the survival of self and others is at stake. I see no tension, in this context, between individual survival and caring – in fact, individual awareness can accommodate an ethics of care in times of need. Asserting that some kinds of Arab women are more feminist than others or engage with more feminist themes than others presumes that Arab women’s writing somehow aspires towards incorporation into the feminist family. Riley’s comments above18 point to the care required when admitting or rejecting certain categories of women into or from the feminist debate. Pointing to an earlier consideration within Egyptian literary criticism over what could be considered creative art, Cooke invokes Fatma Moussa Mahmoud, a critic of Arab writing, who cannot accommodate the deployment, by writers, of personal reflections as material for their fiction. Cooke goes on to claim that: contemporary feminist literary criticism makes the opposite point that it is this very involvement that may qualify the work as literature. If there is to be a gauge of literary excellence transcending gender, it is not the degree to which a work corresponds or not to lived experience, but rather the manner in which the experience is mediated.19 Is the legitimising force of feminist literary criticism such that only its invocation can support such a statement? Zeidan and Cooke’s defence of feminist theory seems to stem from a need to defend women’s literature in and to the Arab world. Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s work on Nawal El Saadawi sets out on a similar trajectory, though it argues persuasively for El Saadawi as feminist based on her activism for women’s rights as well as the purposefulness behind some of her writing (El Saadawi often employs depictions of gender inequality as her premise). It appears nevertheless that this framing set in motion a body of works that could bring Arab women’s writing to fresh readers. One of the first anthologies of Arab women writers, Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (1990), featured both polemical and creative writing. The title foregrounds an emphasis on both the orientation of the writing, ‘feminist’, and its historical continuity: ‘a century of ’. The collection is divided into three sections:

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‘Awareness’, ‘Rejection’ and ‘Activism’, and charts a teleological experience of feminist awakening. This collection is invaluable to the student of Arab women’s writing at all levels and across the board; however, it does present an untroubled narrative that blends autobiography, social criticism, lectures, short stories, introductions to novels and extracts from longer works. The introduction does not identify the feminist arguments that these works are engaging with or against when it offers to ‘assist in the global recovery of women’s feminist voices’.20 The book’s publication by Virago Press authenticates its claims and functions to place the recovered works firmly within a legitimate realm of study. Though Badran and Cooke argue for ‘an analysis of Arab women’s discourse [that] allows us to see feminism where we had previously not thought to look’, this requires care if we are to maintain divergences between radically different forms of feminisms.21 Until the late 1990s most critical works on Arab women’s writing centred around the feminist/nationalist debate. Before moving on to suggest other productive forms of criticism, I want to take a moment to locate certain arguments that may help us conceptualise the backdrop against which this framing took place and came to be favoured above other approaches.

Arab feminism22 Arab feminism has had a long and unsettled history. What is labelled ‘feminism’ in the Middle East is a complex term often associated in public discourse as a hybrid concept that somehow points to and implies foreign intervention. The important accusations from the dominant culture in the Arab world against feminism have been that on the one hand it is yet another example of the ‘West’ interfering and meddling in the affairs of the ‘East’. This position has had the unfortunate symptom of re-affirming the position of the East as gullible and easily taken in by alluring Western ideas. Thus, as well as having to deal with the inherent obstructions to the setting up of groups and movements for the improvement of women’s lives, secular liberals as well as Islamist women’s groups have had to defend themselves against the allegations from conservative groups that they are working within Western models unsuitable for Arab women.23 Malti-Douglas emphatically asserts that: Any reasonable discussion of the applicability of an intellectual or political ideology in a non-Western context must consider not only feminism but other ideologies and movements as well. The most obvious of these is Marxism. While many Middle Easterners, notably neotraditionalists, reject Marxism as foreign and irrelevant, most of those, both inside and outside the region, who question the applicability of feminism have no objections to applying concepts like class, imperialism, capitalism and exploitation to Middle Eastern societies.24 Interestingly, in relation to this seemingly incontestable impediment, Mervat Hatem, in her article ‘Egyptian Discourses on Gender and Political Liberalization:

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Do Secularist and Islamisist Views Really Differ?’ has shown that in fact there is a way to reconcile the problem. She states that she: seeks to develop an appreciation of the Western liberal ideal and its practice as well as the Egyptian transformation of both into something that reflects Egypt’s cultural background and political challenges. [This] does not assume the superiority of the Western model, the inferiority of the Egyptian one, or vice versa. Examining both the external and internal critiques of liberalism is important for understanding the global, gendered discourse.25 The notion that Western feminism or any other political theories may be perceived to have unwanted influences for an Arab feminist reworking of ideals and political engagement could be substituted by Hatem’s suggestion that we explore how these can be and have been transformed into local agendas. As Malti-Douglas reminds us: ‘gender consciousness is hardly new to Middle Eastern society. Social, cultural, historical, and legal questions relating to male–female roles, equality of women, and so forth have been part and parcel of Arabo-Islamic discourse for centuries.’26 Indeed, Malti-Douglas provides a thorough investigation of these ideas in her influential work Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing and alerts us to the fact that there is little to be gained through an outright denial of the possibility of influence. This is a desirable and empowering move, as it not only emphasises the conscious selective use of Western and other feminist theories but also helps establish a cross-cultural feminism and transnational feminism that continuously works to avoid pitfalls and misrepresentations. As Rajeswari Mohan has discussed in her article on Palestinian women and their militant participation in nationalist struggle as a site of self-understanding: recent theoretical interventions in Anglo-American feminist discourses provide some powerful concepts which allow us to trace the actual mechanisms by which women’s participation in political movements bring about social transformation, not simply by disrupting gender divisions of labour and politics, but also by remapping the social symbolic of the sexual. However, the encounter with alternate sites of feminist theory and practice will remain incomplete if the circuit is not closed, and if the counter-pressure exerted by texts of post-colonial and Third World insurgency on AngloAmerican theory is not acknowledged. Such an acknowledgement will make unique demands on any attempt to account for or understand the circumstances of non-western women’s lives from the standpoint of western academic discourses, for such attempts are inevitably animated by the dialectical tension produced by the ambivalent and ambiguous distinctions between them and us, as well as by the different meanings the texts hold in the different sites they circulate.27 Mohan’s contentions were timely and suggestive. Her call for an expansion of the definition of feminism and, by extension, feminist takes distinct contexts into

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account and allows for a reading of historical or fictional moments that carefully considers what makes for feminist experience or practice at the local level (as opposed to what is then appropriated at the global level). This can be a useful way of measuring the effectiveness of certain subversive acts and demands a rethinking of what constitutes a living feminism. As Haiden Moghissi has emphasised in her work Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of a Post-Modern Analysis: feminism is diversified and flexible enough to embrace all individuals and movements which are self-identified or are identified by others as feminist based on distinguishable ideological and political characteristics.28 Likewise, in her introduction to Re-Making Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East Lila Abu-Lughod notes how in the Middle East ‘feminism, defined sometimes in quite different ways, [has] become by now an inescapable term of reference’.29 She also points to the ‘complex ways that the West and things associated with the West [are] embraced, repudiated and translated [and] are implicated in contemporary gender politics’.30 Reminiscent of Malti-Douglas’s arguments, Abu-Lughod states in her essay ‘The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics’ that Islamic groups only demarcate certain features of feminism as Western while appropriating obvious Western influence in other areas as their own31 (My emphasis). This complicates even further the parameters of an Arab feminism, as it suggests that it has to operate in a complex arena where objectives shift continuously. In their anthology Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke try to trace feminists who may not have understood themselves as such but whose actions and writings, claim the editors, tell a different story.32 Their contention is that an examination of specific locations and contexts is essential because ‘much of Arab women’s feminist expression has eluded people because of its invisibility’.33 Invisibility here suggests not only the invisibility of actions understood and identified as feminist within the society where this expression is introduced, but a further invisibility of an Arab feminism in the spread of culture and knowledge.34 Thus, Badran argues, there is a distinction to be made (and although Badran speaks specifically of Egypt this argument can be extended to include much of early Arab women’s writing) between ‘invisible and visible feminism’.35 In fact, she argues that: [this distinction] rescues feminism from being understood as an exclusively public and explicit phenomenon, and thus provides an analytic framework within which to locate and explain the more comprehensive feminist historical experience . . . Feminism may be removed from sight, but it is not necessarily extinguished.36 Nevertheless, which understanding of ‘feminism’ is being alluded to here remains hazy and unspecified. Whilst we may aspire towards an Arab feminist

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discourse, its definition and demarcation often remains elusive. It can emerge, but how will it be defined? In fact, as we try to understand and interpret what can qualify as a feminist experience or a feminist realisation it is important to pay attention to, in Abu-Lughod’s words, ‘the fascinating subtleties of the debates about women at particular historical moments’.37 Abu-Lughod points out that the necessary aim of the collection of essays entitled Remaking Women has at its centre the need to go beyond ‘recognis[ing] that women [are] caught in polemics about cultural authenticity . . . [and] to investigate in detail the dynamics by which local and Western discourses and actors played off each other’.38 In a sense, my present analysis invokes and reflects these issues and concerns precisely; local and Western discourses are ever present when we speak of Arab feminism because they cannot be discursively separated. It seems to me that in attempting to stage an Arab feminism that acts in opposition on the one hand to local forms of patriarchy and on the other to imposed Western norms, we may miss the more subtle interventions that take place in between. The following chapters examine the influences of Western feminist critique, but expand these through an incorporation of postcolonial and other philosophical considerations. It remains central to my project to question how and, indeed, if feminism is articulated in postcoloniality; in Mohan’s words, to close the circuit of influence.39 What I argue for is a revolving and evolving cycle that informs as well as transforms the ideas of Western and other feminisms. Abu-Lughod’s interesting use of the word ‘actor’ above would suggest that the parties involved in debating today’s feminisms are well aware of the paradox of adopting some Western feminist notions that they do not always acknowledge. This in itself creates a space where we can critically test Western feminism on Arab contexts to establish their value. This need not suppose, as Mervat Hatem has claimed above, that the Western feminism that is taken into account is condescending or that the material it is tested on is necessarily in need of Western explication. On the contrary, as Abu-Lughod and Hatem (whose arguments I shall outline below) have argued, the selective use of Western feminism has been a common factor in the women’s emancipation movement in the Arab world for a long time. I will use this phenomenon to argue that it is in keeping with this discourse that we continue to use certain Western feminist ideas in the context of the Middle East to test their efficaciousness and to view various Arab women’s political and cultural achievements from this perspective. Were we to forfeit the new and invigorating principles behind Western feminist and cultural thought we would be committing a second injustice. Testing the theories in the context of the Middle East will hopefully delineate the pitfalls as well as the usefulness of the application of this transcultural technique.

Western cultural exports in Arab social thought In her work Men, Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics, Malti-Douglas makes the following bold statement:

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Modern Arab culture, from its most secular to its most religious manifestations, from its most elite to its most popular products, bears the inescapable imprint of Western cultural exports. More important, there is no contemporary intellectual figure, be he or she the most neotraditionalist of Islamic revivalists, whose thought has not been powerfully affected by modern European ideas. (My emphasis)40 Though I hope to deal with the upshot of this statement more fully elsewhere,41 here I want to point to the implication that this contention has in relation to the critical practice surrounding Arab women’s writing and the reception of this writing. It seems to me that the current postcolonial feminist debates can accommodate Malti-Douglas’s contention and integrate this within a responsible framework where these ‘imprints’ are openly discussed. As Abu-Lughod reminds us: In Egypt ever since the late nineteenth century when reformers and nationalist modernisers took up the question of women’s status and role in society, there has been a struggle between those who seek to locate women’s emancipation, variously defined, at the heart of the development of nation and of society and those who try to dislocate such a project as an alien Western import. However, the contemporary form this debate takes reveals something that is often overlooked: those who claim to reject feminist ideals as Western imports actually practice a form of selective repudiation that depends on significant occlusions.42 Here, what Abu-Lughod is suggesting is that there are still certain unacknowledged influences that help form the Arab discourse on women. Some influences are later rejected and labelled ‘Western imports’ and ‘alien’, whilst the ones incorporated are presented as innate to Arab thought. Abu-Lughod questions how these two sets of concepts became separated in Arab discourses on feminism and suggests that there is a ‘clue’ in the ‘Islamists’s rhetorical claim to cultural authenticity and traditionalism’ (p. 244). In other words, AbuLughod argues that the Islamists prefer to gesture towards cultural authenticity and tradition as the repositories where progressive ideas can be found. AbuLughod suggests that often these ideas prove to have been influenced by Western thought and can no longer be thought of as traditional (p. 244). In the footsteps of Timothy Mitchell and Leila Ahmed, Abu-Lughod argues against the cultural prominence of Qasim Amin, an advocate of women’s rights in turn-ofthe-century Egypt: Although he spoke of women’s rights, education and work, what he ultimately was most interested in promoting was the modern bourgeois family with its ideal of conjugal love and scientific child rearing. This is a form of family that some Western feminists, Marxists and social theorists of the second half of the twentieth century have now come to criticize as a source

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Contemporary Arab women writers of women’s subjection because of the way it divides women from one another, gives them new tasks, places them under the control of their husbands and opens up the family to capitalist exploitation, state control and new forms of discipline. (p. 254)

This important argument suggests that there is a silent dialogue between the Arab world and the West as well as an exchange of ideas that often go unacknowledged and certainly undisclosed. As Abu-Lughod argues, certain unwanted formulations are labelled as ‘Western’. Their obstinate return marks their reality outside of Western influence. This emphasises another problem of how and with what tools to intervene. It is significant that Haiden Moghissi has located a ‘lopsided’ situation in the Middle East where ‘modernisation’ but ‘not modernism or modernity’ has occurred (and which are obviously not to be confused, for modernisation ‘alters aspects of the urban economy but without fundamentally transforming social and political structures or relations and forms of cultural expression’) (p. 54). The question of how to apply postmodern thought to a society that has not, strictly speaking, had a period of modernism is a problematic one for many Arab feminists working from outside the Arab world, though I have often considered this an unnecessary burden. Moghissi has argued that if the postmodernist outlook is to view changes from other cultures as movements that do not require foreign feminist intervention, then this can sometimes leave local Arab feminists or would-be feminists helpless in the face of what they perceive to be negative circumstances. Thus: in supporting the rights of minority cultures and indigenous traditions, we should ask ourselves: do we know with any precision whose cultures and whose rights to self-expression we are supporting? . . . To avoid mystification we need to take into account the particular setting for such events and not to be intimidated by charges that this insistence constitutes a metanarrativist intrusion.43 (pp. 59–60) Moghissi argues that ‘the public domain has become the primary site for women to demand removal of legal and social obstacles to gender equity, providing the terrain for more effective collective struggle’, even though this public domain sometimes remains unavailable to them (p. 81). Moments of so-called subversion of the norms remain individual and are not always seen but, rather, experienced personally. Moghissi asks if in fact ‘cultural relativists [have] . . . [low expectations] when it comes to the rights of women in non-Western societies’ (p. 117). In fact, by placing emphasis, instead, at least in theory, on including all women by accepting the multiplicity of each woman’s identity and self-identification, feminists are now urged to respect difference, affirming the singularity of

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each woman’s experiences and struggle, and validating self-understanding and self-analysis. (p. 125) This, I believe complicates issues even further. Though many contemporary feminist theorists seek individual moments of self-understanding and awareness and term them feminist, these moments often remain divorced from the bigger picture, where the effect of the experiences is not translated into a more lasting one; thus, the experience loses any political/social effectiveness it may have had (as well as the chance to enter the arena of policy and law making). The permanent and lasting effect of experience is important, yet it is a process which needs to be completed by practical researchers and theorists alike so that a particular event that prompts this ‘self-understanding’ or ‘self-analysis’ can be utilised discursively and effectively. It is possible that the reshaping of Butler’s theory of the performative as a conscious move that can offer personal ‘self-understanding’ offers a singular and original opportunity to view individual women’s actions as self-liberating. Nevertheless, in the context of the Arab world in general and in the critical reception of Arab women’s writing in particular, the call for political and social reform remains a fundamental issue. As Moghissi’s study has shown: It is troubling and revealing that the new generation of Middle Eastern feminists are still struggling for [these] rights under the same if not more hostile conditions in societies which are much more developed, socially and economically, than in the 1930’s. (p. 130) It seems clear to me that working to elucidate these complex circumstances requires a particular sensitivity towards what can be defined as feminism and who can be termed a feminist. Often, local understandings of the term are not commensurate with what theorists looking in perceive it to be. Our idea of feminism needs not only to acknowledge ‘organised women’s movements’, which has already been well documented,44 but also to discuss, as Abu-Lughod argues, ‘a wide range of projects that have or had as an explicit goal or necessary foundation the remaking of women’ without having to justify or promote ‘historical individuals as heroines or icons of modernity, making their complex lives signify the story of progress’.45 I think contemporary writing is one such project; placing women’s concerns, be they understood as consciously feminist or not (and I am not certain that this is actually what matters in the long run) at the forefront of literary production. For the sake of discursive clarity, it might be possible, as Moghissi has done, to ‘consider feminism as a universal movement against sexism (which takes different forms and is practised with differing vigour in different societies)’ (p. 93). Furthermore: One of the advantages of such an inclusive definition is that one is not forced to apologize when local projects do not appear to conform to a

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Contemporary Arab women writers particular definition of feminism. Nor need one try to explain away – with arguments about expediency, safe topics or marketing – stances that seem to go against a liberal or socialist feminist thrust.46

In short, it is a daunting task to tackle feminist issues in the Arab world whilst remaining sensitive to all the above problematics; however, what makes this type of work exciting and productive is its constant need to redefine itself against the various obstacles outlined above. There is still ‘no fully acceptable’ term for feminism or feminist in Arabic.47 It is difficult to agree upon a term that is enabling yet which does not echo foreign influence. As the above arguments have suggested, certain concepts have filtered through and have been reshaped to suit the needs of women living in the Arab world, often within the remits of a religious society or a secularist one that does admit religious influence or encourage homogeneity.48 It seems that while certain ‘feminist’ activities have been acknowledged and embraced as necessary, such as the need for the education of women and the benefits of a marriage based on friendship, as well as the integration of women in the workplace in times of economic necessity, other needs such as public freedom are rejected and posited as Western influences. However, as Moghissi has argued, researchers who uphold a postmodernist stance towards gender equality and the treatment of women are in danger of committing a crime equal to that of colonialism. Although Moghissi discusses Iran in particular, her comments are useful if we are to remember that although Western feminism can no longer assume its superiority of value, it can continue to work with women of other nationalities in order to expand and modify important theoretical and practical ‘feminisms’. What remains important, however, within the confines of my argument, is how feminist ideals and ideas can be shown to be already at work in an Arab context. Also, if we understand issues of feminism in the Arab world to have always been in dialogue with the West, then we can claim this work to be a continuation of this dialogue rather than an imposition. If we are to successfully extend a ‘loose’ and ‘inclusive’ definition to feminism, then it becomes ‘impossible for us to forget that feminism always occurs in particular contexts, historical or social’.49 Gayle Rubin, in an illuminating interview with Judith Butler, discusses whether ‘‘looking at’’ various events [can be considered] a theoretical activity’.50 More specifically, Butler asks Rubin whether we look with or through certain kinds of theoretical suppositions? And are certain kinds of practices ‘seeable’ or ‘unseeable’ depending on which theoretical presuppositions are used?51 Butler’s question is very important here, as it reminds us to foreground the suppositions that we are working with. Although Judith Butler is interviewing American anthropologist Gayle Rubin over the research that Rubin undertakes in her own field of feminist and gay and lesbian politics, as well as more specialised areas within this field,52 the discussion over ‘descriptive and theoretical

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work’ remains important in its attention to the role of theoretical methodologies and how these are used. In the particular context under discussion, it is difficult to decide when the ‘seeable’ is indeed seeable of its own accord or because of the ‘theoretical presupposition’ underlining it. In order to avoid such pitfalls, I propose to acknowledge these very obvious problems and to emphasise that this is a two-way process where critical tools are also threatened with losing their legitimacy in the face of contextual detail. Instead, I hope to show that tools are simultaneously enabling and disabling as the writers in question renegotiate ways of being a woman, ways of being feminist and ways of rejecting affiliations to fixed categories.

Feminist postcolonial theory and Arab representation In their recent edited collection Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, Reina Lewis and Sara Mills provide a selection of feminist theory from around the world that has impacted in some way on postcolonial theory. In their introduction, they lay out the necessity for such a publication as well as deliberate on the trajectory of mainstream feminist theory. Specifically, they note that It is clear that current feminist postcolonial theory still exerts a pressure on mainstream postcolonial theory in its constant iteration of the necessity to consider gender issues. . . . Feminist postcolonial theory has engaged in a two-fold project: to racialise mainstream feminist theory and to insert feminist concerns into conceptualisations of colonialism and postcolonialism.53 Although it becomes clear how feminist postcolonial theory exerts this pressure onto postcolonial theory by insisting on gender issues, feminist theory now also requires that other matters be considered equally, such as class, race and sexuality. Keen to ensure that racial and sexual difference play an important part in any discussion of the experience of gender, Lewis and Mills emphasise that women’s involvement in complex patterns of power and oppression could be seen as the conditions of possibility for the emergence of new forms of international feminist agency – forms that sought alliances with other women rather than allowing educated Western white women to speak on behalf of ‘all women’. (p. 6) The problems of speaking for rather than listening to take centre stage in their discussion of ‘Third World Feminism’. Nevertheless, what becomes evident in this collection is that the conditions and cultural productions of Arab women intellectuals, with the exception of a few committed scholars in the field, have to a large extent suffered from a slow reaction to how their local experiences could energise the project of feminist postcolonial theory at large. This could be put down to several reasons that render the context of Arab women’s writing limiting in its

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potential to create new forms of rethinking gender identities and broadening their theoretical potential. Overemphasis on direct social problems has to a large extent overshadowed other issues with relation to Arab women’s experiences. What is important to consider, however, is how existing concepts that have come to prominence via postcolonial theory have made it possible to examine Arab women’s writing from a wider perspective that does not give prominence to any one means of influence (such as religion, politics, ethnicity, etc.).54 This feminist postcolonial theory reader as a whole serves as a reminder of how certain aspects of area studies have rejuvenated postcolonial theory and rendered it an ongoing and productive intervention. Certainly, a host of feminist considerations have become embedded in postcolonial discussions. The feminist postcolonial essays available in Mills and Lewis’s reader make known to us the plethora of work involved in the rethinking of geographical and historical contexts. The articles reveal the continuous revision that is involved in culturally sensitive projects and the ongoing challenge of understanding the breadth of investigation that has still to be undertaken in the area of feminist postcolonial theory. The reader covers vast areas of interest such as ‘Racialising Feminism’, ‘Rethinking Whiteness’, ‘Re-defining the Third World Subject’, ‘Sexuality and Sexual Rights’, ‘Harem and the Veil’ and ‘Post/Colonial Spatial Relations’. Certainly, the Arab world is represented both under the sections ‘Sexuality and Sexual Rights’ through Franc¸oise Lionnet and under ‘Harem and the Veil’ through Fatima Mernissi, Meyda Yegenoglu, Winfred Woodhull and Fadwa El Guindi, where the politics of the veil in its colonial and postcolonial form is revisited in order to reveal the complexity of owning or criticising these contested sites. Fatima Mernissi and Fadwa El Guindi make a strong appearance, whilst a host of other critics discuss issues related to the Arab world. However, it is crucial to note that the two entries by Arab women concentrate on the topic of the veil. Whilst not wishing to devalue this topic, it does seem as though other possible routes of inquiry have been sacrificed. Fatima Mernissi’s article dates back to 1975 and is an extract from her influential work Beyond the Veil: Male– Female Dynamics in Muslim Society. Crucial for a preliminary understanding of the make-up of non-secular religious communities, Mernissi here uses concepts borrowed from Mary Douglas’s 1970 Purity and Danger in order to comment broadly on the relationship between sexual patterns and power. Whilst important and polemic, the extract does not answer those questions posed in the introduction. Mernissi, primarily a sociologist, sources Max Weber in order to critically comment on the social structure of Moroccan society. Her work documents in detail women’s role in the home, in the office and in the streets in order to reveal how religious doctrine and social expectation guide women’s behaviour and the way that men behave with women. Whilst significant and evocative, this piece seems obsolete in a collection that seeks to undertake a productive review of current work that brings colonial discourse, postcolonial theory and feminist practice together. While a foundational text of great importance to early Arab feminism, this extract fails, however, to give a sense of

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the invigorating work that is being currently undertaken. El Guindi’s article, again, whilst highly informative on the history of the Egyptian feminist movement and the phenomenon of the newly veiled women in Egypt, does not provide us with a sense of contemporary understandings of the veil, whether through lived moments, representation through literature and popular culture or current politics. These two representatives of Arab women activists remind us of the ongoing feminist debates surrounding the veil and women’s agency but do not engage with the more pressing arguments concerning postcolonial intervention and Arab women’s concerns. Without wishing to undermine or challenge the very necessary and important essays in the collection, it is equally important to acknowledge the more nuanced mediation undertaken by Arab feminist thinkers and critics who are seeking to expand on directions inaugurated through the proliferation of postcolonial theory (such as Miriam Cooke, Leila Abu-Lughod and Leila Ahmed among others). It is here necessary perhaps to weigh up current critical debates surrounding Arab women writers. In her article ‘Publishing in the West: Problems and Prospects for Arab Women Writers’,55 Amal Amireh argues that it is often easy to discern why certain works by Arab women writers succeed in the West and are embraced as somehow ‘enlightening’. Achieving acclaim in the West, Amireh argues, has unfortunately come with its own set of preconceptions, none of which allows the texts to stand alone. What has also been interesting is the way in which Arab women writers have been critical of each other in terms of whom their work appeals to and why. Using the example of Nawal El Saadawi, by now an established author and feminist, Amireh argues that I agree that el-Saadawi is popular in the West partly because her works have played into Western prejudices. But I don’t think that this fact should be merely used to dismiss her achievement. This current generation of Arab women writers face the same problems of reception she has faced and will be better off reflecting on the historical factors behind this kind of reception than elevating themselves at the expense of their predecessor.56 Amireh here points to the difficulties that Arab women writers have had in avoiding certain predictable responses. Malti-Douglas also writes of the difficulty writers have had attaining regard from local audiences who are privy to the conditions of writing: It is difficult to understand how the male critic Sabry Hafez, writing in 1989, could argue that from her first novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor to her then latest novel, The Fall of the Imam, Nawal El Saadawi’s fiction has not undergone any ‘artistic and intellectual development’.57 More recent authors, such as Alia Mamdouh and Adhaf Soueif, are quick to reprimand more established authors such as El Saadawi but, interestingly, this

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Contemporary Arab women writers

does not resolve or even further the debates surrounding the reception of their work. For example, Alia Mamdouh asserts that she has ‘large question marks about the West’s celebration and focus on’ El Saadawi. Nawal El Saadawi, Mamdouh maintains, ‘does not represent the true picture of the creativity of Arab Women’. Ahdaf Soueif seconds this when she maintains that ‘El-Saadawi writes scientific research which is good. But she writes bad novels and it is unfair that the West thinks that what she writes represents Arab women’s creative writing.’58 Just what the subject of this writing should be, in terms of its marketability, is a question that Amin Malak is interested in when he reminds us that (in writing of the anticipation of Ahdaf Soueif ’s work in particular and new Arab women writers in general) while the creative process of producing literary works veers, as indeed it should, from pamphleteering and socio-anthropological documentation, the mostly mimetic mode deployed in the fiction of Arab and Muslim women provokes our eager anticipation of a candid, courageous unveiling of some of the chilling acts of violence perpetrated against women in several Muslim societies, at times even in the name of religion, acts such as the hideously gruesome practice of female circumcision or genital mutilation.59 What Malak is clearly addressing here is the exposure to ‘grisly realities’60 expected of Arab women’s writing that has led some writers in the past to produce what he terms the ‘mimetic mode’ of writing, where social problems are merely reproduced for the reader (an attempt at social realism that then dangerously comes to define Arab women’s writing) and where creative representation is considered an indulgence. Certainly, many critics have complained of ElSaadawi and others who write in this style in order to gain literary attention. However, as Amireh points out, ‘Mamdouh makes it clear that she is suspicious of the attention her own writing is getting outside the Arab world’ (My emphasis).61 This points to the sensitive approach required towards the critical reception of Arab women writers that are ‘being taught in the West more now than at any other time’, where accessibility and visibility becomes part of the discussion centred around these works.62 As Majaj, Sunderman and Saliba remind us, in their introduction to Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels: ‘Arab women’s texts are used in literature and women’s studies courses with growing frequency, and Arab women writers have gained increasing recognition in English speaking contexts.’63 Importantly, diversity is on the rise, making it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to define the Arab woman writer (Amireh notes 150 writers at the 1995 Arab Women Book Fair in Cairo). Specifically, Amireh notes that diversity guards against stereotyping and pigeon-holing. Once Western readers are exposed to a range of styles, nuances and ideologies, they will learn that Arab writers are individual artists, who speak in multiple tongues and belong to vibrant and diverse cultural movements.64

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More importantly though, Amireh encourages an active criticism that engages with this diversity: Serious debates about fiction will remind readers that they are reading not documentaries but ‘literature,’ which draws on particular conventions and emerges from specific traditions. Critics aware of the original context in which these works appeared should convey a sense of these contexts to their readers.65 It is necessary therefore to expand on context in the criticism of works. I find this to be increasingly the most useful role that a critic can perform. I do not here intend exhaustive historical and political context only. Instead, what I propose is a critique that opens up contextual possibilities, for example, reading the work of contemporary Arab women writers alongside contemporary popular culture such as cinema, music, news media, television and other popular cultural forms. This then enables an interdisciplinary approach where the literature can be accessed from a variety of fields. Contemporary postcolonial studies’ interdisciplinary approach has enabled literature to be viably studied and made intelligible alongside cultural studies. This allows us to study the works as themselves, engaging with other forms of culture as well as with broad literary and political debates. Any serious study of the Arab world must take into account the huge sway that popular culture holds. In his influential work Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt, Walter Armbrust discusses the capacity of popular culture to both reflect and produce discourses of gender and nationalism that are widely intelligible and identifiable.66 In their recent edited collection Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture, Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg argue for an approach towards popular culture that recognises the ‘alternative’ it offers to ‘the political narratives and paradigms that have dominated academic, activist and popular discourse on Palestine and Israel’.67 I would argue that this could apply to much of the discourse surrounding on the Middle East and Arab world. In ‘Postcolonial Theory and Modern Arabic Literature’ Waı¨l S. Hassan states that Postcolonial studies and Arab literary studies have much to offer each other. Postcolonial studies can add valuable dimensions to Arabic literary scholarship – interdisciplinary inquiry, theoretical sophistication, and historical contextualization – that are lacking in older models of Orientalist scholarship and the current area studies model.68 Here, Hassan envisions how interdisciplinary inquiry and new theoretical frameworks could enrich Arab literary studies while simultaneously engaging and influencing theoretical paradigms. His suggestion that ‘postcolonial theory unveils the limitations, as well as the persistence, of hegemonic discourses’ provides a workable model for those scholars looking to place Arab literary studies within a broader framework. Postcolonial studies’ commitment to interdisciplinarity

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and its refusal to compartmentalise cultural production based on ideas of low or high culture allows for an invigorating reassessment of Arab women’s writing. Hassan is right to note that many of the current issues put forward as ‘features of the ‘‘postcolonial condition’’’ by postcolonial studies, such as hybridity, ‘migrancy, border-crossings’, etc . . . may not be relevant to the ‘vast majority of African and Asian populations’.69 ‘The current impasse in postcolonial studies’, argues Hassan: may therefore be overcome by opening the field to comparative literary studies and to comparative critical methodologies that rigorously interrogate the limits of postcolonial theory’s founding discourses from the multiple perspectives of Arabic, African, and Asian philosophies, realities, cultural worldviews, and cultural memories.70 Abu-Lughod also advocates moving away from lazy criticisms that are either too generous towards their subject matter or too self-aggrandising. Instead, one has to look critically at local and gendered responses to such issues as ‘modernisation’ and their association with the West in order to try and gauge the choice of subject matter for the authors involved. Abu-Lughod’s edited collection ‘show[s] that the forms of feminism in the Middle East tied to modernity ushered in new forms of gendered subjection (in the double sense of subject positions for women and forms of domination) as well as new experiences and possibilities’.71 Significantly, postcolonial studies, in not accepting what Abu-Lughod calls ‘rigid concepts of culture’, can find a way through domineering binaries that threaten to overwhelm the debates. In Abu-Lughod’s words: This leads to different possibilities for analyzing the politics of East and West in the debates about women, ones that do not take the forms of narratives of cultural domination versus resistance, cultural loyalty versus betrayal, or cultural loss versus preservation. It also opens up the possibility of exploring, in all their specificities, the actual cultural dynamics of the colonial encounter and its aftermath.72 Essentially then, it is the criticism from within and without that can unwittingly reproduce these binaries. Although Abu-Lughod does not specifically refer to the study of literature but instead to Arab cultural and socio-historical contexts, her warnings are easily applicable across to literary studies where similar themes are negotiated. Indeed, as her discussion on the specific use of postcolonial theory states, What makes the term ‘postcolonial’ and the mode of thinking and scholarship that has grown up around it pertinent for the Middle East is the unquestionable way that, as even this potted history makes clear, Europe was a crucial context for its historical development and its political and cultural life. One may argue that there persisted alternative ‘traditions’ . . .

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within which argumentations took place, and thus that intellectual life was not only, as earlier intellectual historians of the Middle East have suggested, reactive to Europe. But one must admit that even these could not, certainly from the nineteenth century, have avoided taking into some account the encounter with Europe.73 Postcolonial theory then, seems an apt (both geographically and historically) tool with which to investigate certain experiences in Arab women’s writing to do not only with issues of dislocation and hybridisation74 but also with the discourses of modernity and cultural influence. In many ways, it is these moments of discursive encounter that reveal the potential of feminist postcolonial theory to produce contextualised, nuanced and productive readings of women’s writing. In turn, it should become possible to read Arab women’s writing for what it has to offer us not only in terms of the representation and self-representation of Arab women but indeed across the spectrum of critical theory. Therefore, one might wonder, would it not be possible to read Arab women’s writing through postcolonial theoretical concepts in order to generate fresh debates in feminist and postcolonial theory, thereby bringing these ideas into the arena of contemporary feminist thought? If feminist intellectuals’ aims are to ‘make sense of and ultimately [change] the oppressive power relations encoded in the name of race, nation and empire, as well as those of gender, class and sexuality’,75 then clearly a project that aims to incorporate as many narratives as possible from a variety of geographical and historical contexts ensures the transmission of women’s narratives that can in turn inform others. And whilst I take heed of Abu-Lughod’s warning that ‘we should not jump to celebrate the emergence of different feminisms’, due to the unforeseen results that these could incur, I do agree with her when she advocates that stories are nevertheless worth telling, for it is impossible to ever fully predict the trajectory of narratives. Moving on from this, I advocate committed critiques of these narratives in order to make them accessible and productive and in order to broaden their influence on feminist theory and to redefine the parameters of feminist postcolonial theory. Working within a similar framework to Abu-Lughod and Amireh, Miriam Cooke, in her article ‘Feminist Transgressions in the Postcolonial Arab World’, foregrounds the condition of ‘postcoloniality’ as a productive one. Here, rather than use the tools of postcolonial theory in order to read the material at hand, Cooke argues that women writers have ‘described, critiqued and lyrically reimagined the conditions of possibility for the attainment of justice and citizenship for all. . . . The conditions of postcoloniality have opened up terrains of experience that used to be closed to women.’76 What Cooke argues for in this article is that the conditions of postcoloniality have enabled an answering-back strategy. She asks: Why is it that Arab women are coming forward now to assert themselves and their right to be heard as they call for justice and citizenship for all? I believe that this turn in women’s fortunes and attitudes has to do with the

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Contemporary Arab women writers outcome of independent struggles all over the Arab world. In this region, the legacy of coloniality lingers in the conditions of postcoloniality, that is, the uneven erasure of boundaries, questioning of binaries as well as the possibility of authenticity as people search for viable identities beyond the bounds of the nation. (p. 102)

It is important to consider the timing of cultural production as Cooke does here. When she asks the important question of ‘what was the change in sign-systems which released women’s energies and invited them to play a role in the shaping of the future of the Arab world?’ her answer of ‘the struggle for independence from European rule’ (p. 104) is understandable but limiting. Within this idea of ‘European rule’ lies the implicit influence of Western feminism that has, as Lewis and Mills point out, sought to minimise difference in favour of ideas of a ‘global sisterhood’. In response to this Cooke ends her article by looking ahead to what Arab women writers will be doing in the future. Written six years ago, this article does in many ways prophesise the significant interest in Arab women’s writing yet to come and the setting up of two journals specifically dedicated to Arab women’s studies.77 Cooke concludes with a statement that acts as a testimony to the changing objectives of these writers: Arab women writers want to be free and responsible as individuals and to have the right to participate in political processes as subjects of their own histories, and yet to belong to their multiple communities. The contestatory, enabling strategies they are using in literary, autobiographical, and historical texts compel a different kind of attention. (p. 105) However, with respect to broadening out the potential of Arab women writers to influence the realm of contemporary feminist thinking, critics need to envision productive methods. For, whilst, as Cooke argues, Arab women writers engage with their contexts in these ‘contestatory . . . strategies’, a parallel project that is involved in revealing the potential of these strategies is required to render global the impact of the local. Investigations into how readings of Arab women writers can often be limiting in their scope when operating from outside a feminist postcolonial frame can offer a clearer understanding of the objectives that we should be working towards. The edited collection, Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels published in 2002 and edited by Majaj, Sunderman and Saliba, was a vital and productive collection of critiques on Arab women’s writing. In the conclusion to her article in the collection Amireh notes that the article is the result of a personal attempt by an Arab feminist who writes for a largely Western audience to relocate El Saadawi. Through my search I have learned that in order to undo silences – mine and those of others – in order

Women, not heroines or icons of modernity

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to bridge the gap between the reception of El Saadawi in the West and the Arab world, and in order to partially redress the asymmetry of power between those of us who are situated in the First World and those of us who are not, we need to adopt a different way of reading El Saadawi and other Arab women writers. It is imperative that we always historicise not only the writer and her work but also the reader. We must take into account both the original context of production and reception and the current moment of consumption. Our role as critics and teachers and our relationship to the texts and authors we study at a particular historical moment should become objects of inquiry as much as the books themselves.78 Readership, production and reception are issues that are key to all of the essays in the collection. Amireh’s criticism addresses critiques that often only serve to reinscribe the works as belonging to a certain historical and gendered moment. Instead, it is precisely these fixed markers of identity that need to be questioned and rigorously tested (why does such and such occur in the book? What are the surrounding debates? What are the possible other literary influences? What is the social context?). As Majaj, Sunderman and Saliba reaffirm: ‘the volume of secondary sources on Arab women’s literature does not fully reflect either the availability of this literature or its significance’.79 Nevertheless, steps are being taken in the right direction as a ‘growing awareness of the complexities of Arab women’s experiences is similarly reflected in the increasing inclusion of and attention to Arab women writers in books and essay collections on postcolonialism, transnationalism, global feminism and political resistance’.80 Nevertheless, as I argued earlier, these ‘inclusions’ also require critical attention for what they continue to tell us about the subject matter that is considered worthy of inclusion. Inclusion into a variety of readers and anthologies points towards the productive and expansive use of the narrativisation of these ‘experiences’. A contemporary project that is committed to this will seek to challenge simplistic readings of Arab women’s lives that would privilege gender above all other categories of analysis, and to underscore instead the complexities of the postcolonial contradictions experienced and voiced by Arab women writers.81 Essentially, privileging a feminist reading performs a limiting gesture. Instead: As Arab women’s texts are put into global circulation through processes of translation, publication, and marketing, the critical discussions about these texts also circulate transnationally. [These discussions situate the texts] within the ongoing debates about feminism, nationalism, postcolonialism, sexuality, and identity taking place across national and transnational lines.82 It is significant though to demonstrate how these ideas may filter down and circulate across to form part of the corpus of feminist postcolonial studies. Many of

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the developments discussed by Majaj, Sunderman and Saliba are crucial, as they reveal that critiques of Arab women’s writing as well as the writing itself are receiving more coverage and entering the mainstream of feminist postcolonial work. The articles in the edited collection enact this very philosophy. Wellknown feminist postcolonial critics such as Gayatri Spivak, Denis Kandiyoti and Ania Loomba have coined phrases now used in a multitude of postcolonial analyses that allow the critic to tease out ideas inherent in the text and make these accessible and useful for fresh readers. I am referring specifically to concepts such as that of the subaltern, the native informant, third world woman and Islamic feminism among others. To these immensely useful categories that have facilitated nuanced and directed work on establishing an expanse of feminist postcolonial possibilities, I want to add that of feminist postcolonial cultural translation, where ‘locations’ of encounter can be sought and represented by the critic. Reading Arab women’s writing because and despite of the difficulty surrounding its reception is the challenge. These texts are read for their experiences of location, cultural influence, the expression of national identity, the experience of sexuality, the performance of gender roles and the interrogation of and responses to colonial discourse and postcolonial theory. How the texts negotiate these arenas is the subject of the following chapters.

2

Again Nawal El Saadawi

From medicine to politics to fiction At that time [of writing Memoirs of a Woman Doctor], I had not yet read any feminist literature on women’s struggles or on women’s status in contemporary society – this only came later . . . I still consider Memoirs like a first daughter. (Nawal El Saadawi, author’s note to Memoirs of a Woman Doctor)

In her work The Woman in the Muslin Mask: Veiling and Identity in Postcolonial Literature, Daphne Grace notes that: Despite her controversial reputation, El Saadawi remains one of the most influential and outspoken writers of both fiction and non-fiction in North Africa. Although her fictional works are arguably not ‘refined’ enough to rate as major works of literature, her themes are both revolutionary and provocative. The very fact that her texts sometimes reads as ‘raw’, also perhaps adds to the immediacy of the subject matter.1 Grace indicates that it is El Saadawi’s writings on ‘female genital mutilation, prostitution, madness, and women having to resort to murder to survive’ that have contributed to this reputation. El Saadawi’s radical interventions have always pointed towards ‘highlighting problems as well as indicating women’s varied means of negotiating new identities’.2 Though El Saadawi’s fiction has often been critiqued as an extension of her social criticism,3 I here want to engage with what Caroline Rooney in African Literature, Animism and Politics gestures towards when she asserts that El Saadawi is involved in a struggle for the emancipation of the spirit.4 The form that this spirit takes as it attempts to struggle for recognition is a concern for El Saadawi as she constructs a language and a narrative approach from where she can articulate this very desire. I find this particular ‘raw’ quality that Grace speaks of to be part of the process of this very search for emancipation, a kind of stripping down or stripping away that attempts to reach an origin where the spirit informs the actions of both body and mind. I want to show how El Saadawi’s performative texts acknowledge these constraints and attempt an understanding of what constitutes them as

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constraints. Jane Hiddlestone, in her work on Assia Djebar, acknowledges El Saadawi’s centrality to an Arab feminist project: ‘El Saadawi calls for a necessary movement from the local to the global and though she alludes to the importance of maintaining a sense of feminine diversity, she stresses the need for a unity created over and above particular differences.’5 Here Hiddlestone reminds us of the wider impact that El Saadawi has had on the study of Arab feminism in particular and on Arab writing in general. Amal Amireh’s admirable article (which has advanced scholarship on the Egyptian feminist and writer) ‘Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World’ does precisely this; it frames the reception of El Saadawi’s feminist and fiction writings in the context within which they were produced as well as the context within which they have been consumed both in the Arab world and in the West.6 Amireh argues for a grounded reading of El Saadawi’s work; a reading that is not so quick to set her up against her literary and historical context, instead advancing a more responsible reading of her work that sees it as positioned alongside particular social and literary movements in Egypt and the Arab world. Equally, Amireh is concerned that El Saadawi may have been too easily accepted into the Western academy for the wrong reasons and perhaps naively branded a lonesome revolutionary figure worthy of admiration. Amireh points to several examples where El Saadawi’s work has been framed differently for maximum effect. Speaking of the translated edition of The Hidden Face of Eve, Amireh notes that: In crossing from Egypt to Europe and then to the United States, the book itself underwent major alterations in both content and form. Al-Wajh al-’ari lil-mar’a al-’arabiyyah (literally, The naked face of the Arab woman) becomes The Hidden Face of Eve. Entire chapters in the Arabic edition disappear from the English translation. Two chapters in particular, ‘Woman’s work at home’ and ‘Arab Woman and socialism’, in which El Saadawi critiques capitalism’s exploitation of women and argues for a socialist economic and political system, are not in The Hidden Face of Eve. These are significant omissions since the critique of capitalism in favour of socialism was central to El Saadawi’s project.7 These details are important and necessary to an appreciation of how to situate El Saadawi’s work – her prolific writing, including plays, short stories, novels and feminist and social polemics makes it impossible to categorically summarise or encapsulate her effect and reach. Here, however, I want to consider a technique that I associate with the early and much-discussed novels Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, Two Women in One and, in particular, Woman at Point Zero. These novels strike me as crucial to an understanding of El Saadawi’s later work as a whole, as they favour personal self-reflexive action over detailed socio-historical description. I want to argue for a transcultural and transnational potential located within the novels as a means to limitlessly expand our knowledge concerning the norms associated with the experience of gender and sexuality. The

Again: Nawal El Saadawi

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heroines of the three novels experience ambiguous reactions to their bodies and their sense of self as they come to terms with what it means to be a ‘woman’, a ‘girl’ or a ‘prostitute’. I have discussed elsewhere the significant role that medicine and the medical profession have to play in the formation of gendered identities and whilst I maintain that this is still crucial, I want here to suggest that it is the more fundamental process of gendering that is equally significant.8 This process, it seems, is foregrounded in works that do not revolve around a particularly specific location and that do not set themselves within a particular political or social context (here, location operates metaphorically).9 I am not completely certain of the reasons for this but will hazard a guess that El Saadawi in these novels prioritises space and relationships specifically in order to engender an experience of otherness that cannot be easily or adequately explained away as a feature or symptom of such and such a place/government, etc. Though I am in agreement with Amireh’s framing practice, I am not certain that this does not limit certain possibilities that I associate with some of El Saadawi’s work. The experience of gender, the body and sexuality is not, in fiction, an experience that can always be easily explained or historicised. My sense is that fiction allows for a particular amalgamation of senses and encounters that produce an effect or response. El Saadawi’s fiction should be treated no differently to this, for it seems to me that no amount of historicisation can fully explain the anger, conviction as well as the sense of despair, joy and anticipation represented in the novels. El Saadawi likens Memoirs of a Woman Doctor to a ‘first daughter’. Here, El Saadawi produces the text in order to reveal both how women are constructed as women and how they understand themselves as such. She also produces the novels in order to give hope. This seems to me to aspire to the universal. It is in this spirit that I want to read the novels. This is not to say that I am not aware of the ways in which El Saadawi’s texts have been taken to stand in for all oppressed women. We need to avoid ‘claims to the universal oppression of women’ because, as Therese Saliba articulates, these claims: face two potential dangers. First, they may reinforce simplistic formulas of global sisterhood, which, in their narrow focus on gender oppression, erase socio-economic and political factors in the lives of third world women. Second, these claims are often interpreted as universally Arab or universally African, rather than as transcending cultural borders. In a Western context, the focus on gender oppression, as Chandra Mohanty writes, reinforces the notion that the third world is less evolved, particularly in its treatment of women.10 Indeed, in her 2004 work Feminism without Borders Chandra Talpade Mohanty revisits her founding essay ‘Under Western Eyes’ in order to assess both its impact and how the terms under which the essay was first written have changed. Specifically, Mohanty explores what she considers ‘to be the urgent theoretical and methodological questions facing a comparative feminist politics at

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this moment in history’.11 In recapturing the rhetorical strength of ‘Under Western Eyes’, Mohanty reminds us that one of her first interventions was to argue for a methodological complexity when discussing the Third World that went beyond locating indicators of oppression and towards a ‘belief in the local as specifying and illuminating the universal’ (p. 224). In discussing how terms that once seemed to indicate political power relations such as Western/Third World, now seem to ‘explain much less than the categorizations ‘‘North/South’’ or ‘‘One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds’’’ (p. 226), Mohanty reminds me of El Saadawi’s preference for that category North/South, better understood as a ‘metaphorical rather than geographical distinction’.12 Where Mohanty states her focus now lies is on ‘anticapitalist transnational feminist practice – and on the possibilities, indeed on the necessities, of cross-national feminist solidarity and organizing against capitalism’ (p. 230). What is interesting for me here is the extent to which El Saadawi has been operating in these material and discursive fields for some time, in many ways anticipating many of the concerns of postcolonial feminists.13 It is perhaps not surprising however, that the structures at work in what Rooney, in relation to El Saadawi, has termed ‘the authorization of knowledge’ in the West/First World/North have prevented the ‘receptivity’14 of her work and insights. El Saadawi has often found herself alternately alienated or prized, answering to accusations along the lines of: ‘Western feminist’, ‘giving the Arabs a bad name’ and a ‘tool for Western imperialism’.15 Perhaps what Grace has defined as ‘unrefined’ and ‘raw’ is a reaction to the immediacy (both physically and psychologically) with which El Saadawi’s writing touches a nerve and shocks (not through its subject matter, but through the treatment of the subject matter). Much of El Saadawi’s fiction operates on the level of what Sara Ahmed has called secret meetings with women from other worlds (the notion of meetings here embraces the act of reading and translating other women’s works).16 These meetings enact Mohanty’s call for the proliferation of possibilities of meaning and I here want to act on her suggestion that we continue to ‘draw attention to what is unseen, undertheorized, and left out in the production of knowledge about globalization’ (p. 230) and am in agreement with her formulation that ‘capital as it functions now depends on and exacerbates racist, patriarchal, and heterosexist relations of rule’ (p. 231). El Saadawi enacts the social justice that Mohanty seeks in her fictional writing about women who undergo poverty and injustice and how they ‘make the workings of power visible’ (p. 231). Though to an extent all of El Saadawi’s work gestures towards this enterprise, the novels discussed here, and in particular Woman at Point Zero, most successfully achieve this effect. El Saadawi has irrefutably maintained the centrality of making the workings of power visible in all of her writing: As once [I had] made the link between curative and preventative medicine, then moved to make the link between preventative medicine and social conditions, I now started to make the link between the social, the economic, the political and the cultural in society.17

Again: Nawal El Saadawi

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In an interview in 1992 El Saadawi described how fiction became the means through which she could best explore these issues: The effect of fiction on me is deeper than the effect of studies. When I write a study, I am illuminated by the research, but when I write a novel, I know myself better. The same is true for readers. When you read a novel, you become another person. You have a totally new light, and you have a new conception of fighting and courage, of weakness and cowardice. You understand many things about yourself; how weak you are and how strong you can be.18 In a sense, while El Saadawi’s non-fiction secured her political and social recognition, her fiction celebrates what the polemic cannot always guarantee, a possible cross-understanding and experience in the climate of uncertainty vis-a`vis the other woman, albeit a fictional one (precisely the location, I argue, where what is said to be impossible is maintained as a possibility). El Saadawi does not necessarily construct characters that conform to social types (the prostitute, the peasant, etc.). Rather, she creates characters that speak to humanity about certain fundamental components of women’s bodies and lives; how they are sexualised, gendered, policed and privileged. It is this voice that has perhaps troubled readers and has led to critics protesting her lack of creative talent, her creation of ‘one dimensional characters’, etc.19 I want to argue instead for the difficulty in trying to define a social problem whilst simultaneously describing the process of gender awakening. Judith Butler has written, in connection with this difficulty: One need only consider how [racial or] gendered slurs live and thrive in and as the flesh of the addressee, and how these slurs accumulate over time, dissimulating their history, taking on the semblance of the natural, configuring and restricting the doxa that counts as ‘reality.’ In such bodily productions resides the sedimented history of the performative, the ways in which sedimented usage comes to compose, without determining, the cultural sense of the body, and how the body comes to disorient the cultural sense in the moment of expropriating the discursive means of its own production. The appropriation of such norms to oppose their historically sedimented effect constitutes the insurrectionary moment of that history, the moment that founds the future through a break with the past.20 It is indeed difficult to distinguish, in El Saadawi’s early novels, between the characters’ experiences of their social surroundings and their interiority – I think this is precisely where El Saadawi’s innovation lies. In many ways, there is no distinction between the two as they continuously produce each other in a frenzy of exchange. The actions and words of El Saadawi’s heroine (or heroines) contain and produce ‘sedimented histor[ies]’ of their surroundings that require dismantling by the reader. El Saadawi draws characters that jolt and shudder into

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recognition of themselves, and it is here, at the site of the ‘insurrectionary moment[s]’ that transnational/transcultural connections can be drawn. El Saadawi associates the experience of being a body that is discriminated against with the development of herself as a writer. This move inevitably leads El Saadawi into a discourse firmly rooted in identity politics, a politics whose definition, as it applies to her, she nevertheless challenges. As she perceptively pinpoints: ‘are ‘‘identity politics’’ [an] exclusive tool of the powerful against the peoples who are being postcolonialised?’21 Here El Saadawi takes issue with theorists who take Third World Women (and postcolonialise them) as their object of study in order to impose a worldview on them. El Saadawi questions the privileging of the concept of identity and wonders whether it is in fact an enforced, unwanted imposition. As an activist, she concentrates on the political and economic foundations that make international feminist discourses problematic yet desirable, without an explicit focus on identity politics. El Saadawi cannot conceive of a non-political woman, yet theorises the possibility of a space where cultural imperialism does not prevail and imagines a postmodernism that can accommodate an ethics of individualism, fearing as she does that ‘postmodernism itself is a form of cultural fundamentalism’.22 El Saadawi persistently asks whether there is any room for real intercultural thinking and writing in contemporary postcolonial feminism, and has often criticised academics who claim to speak for the other. For example, in criticising an unnamed postcolonial philosopher (presumably Spivak), El Saadawi writes that s/he has a love–hate relationship with poor oppressed women and men who are struggling to live. S/he worships them, calls them the ‘subaltern’, glorifies their authentic identity or culture, but at the same time looks down on them, considers them as docile or struggling bodies unable to produce philosophy or as local activists but not global thinkers. S/he abolishes subaltern philosophies and replaces them on the global intellectual scene; s/he becomes the philosopher of the subaltern who knows more about them than they know about themselves.23 What is being questioned here is the possibility that although the subaltern can allegedly contain within him/her a site of truth (this is enacted in the opening scenes of Woman at Point Zero), is it only Western philosophy, reframed and reconceptualised as postcolonial theory that has the privilege to pronounce on the validity of others’ narratives? El Saadawi, though she does not makes this explicit in the extract above, seems to be criticising Spivak’s philosophy, in particular the ideas advanced in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Though I believe El Saadawi to have misread Spivak’s point, I have understood El Saadawi to be critical of Spivak’s personal position (operating within the Western academy) rather than her rhetorical undertaking. Although, for Spivak, her position within the academy24 may be inevitable, for El Saadawi it is not.25 El Saadawi nevertheless fails to see in Spivak what they may hold in common. In her article ‘The Politics of Translation’, Spivak specifically argues for the multiplicity of femin-

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isms and for those feminisms to be acknowledged and engaged with by the Western academy when she writes that ‘there are countless languages in which women all over the world have grown up and been female or feminis.26 In ‘Intimate Touches: Proximity and Distance in International Feminist Dialogues’, Sara Ahmed, in solidarity with Spivak’s call, maintains that, to a certain degree, ‘Western feminism involves a refusal to become intimate; it judges from afar by reading ‘‘the other’’ as a sign of the universal.’27 Likewise, in her essay entitled ‘The Bitter Lot of Women’, El Saadawi argues that the non-sensationalising of Eastern (Southern as she alternatively terms it) feminist issues would mark a first step for their involvement in a serious universal discussion/discourse and welcomes this moment as a potentially invigorating and successful one. However, what position would be considered as non-essentialising and who would be responsible for this? What does El Saadawi mean when she argues for a nonsensationalising politics? I would suggest that it is the sign of the universal itself that El Saadawi questions and that needs to be re-evaluated, and its boundaries and limitations as an ideology clearly termed. As Judith Butler has confirmed in Excitable Speech: The universal can only be articulated in response to a challenge from (its own) outside. As we call for the regulation of injurious speech on the basis of ‘universally’ accepted presuppositions, do we reiterate practices of exclusion and abjection? What constitutes the community that might qualify as a legitimate community that debates and agrees upon this universality? (p. 90) Indeed, agreeing on what a universality would look like, its paradigms and boundaries not regulated by imperatives of political correctness that may come from the West or East (for example, from Islamic feminism), is crucial yet almost impossible to imagine.28 Instead, we need to view, as Sara Ahmed has aptly stated, ‘how [do] local struggles, which are affected by transnational processes, become themselves elements of a struggle which is transnational?’29 Though El Saadawi on the one hand constructs polemics against fundamentalist ideologies that create a restricted world and the inhumane conditions that rule the lives of many Arab women, she is also very subtle in her representations of how these contradictions are processed and subsequently expressed by the individual characters in her novels, perhaps intuiting that narrative can aspire to the universal. El Saadawi is also very witty, pointing to contradictions inherent in Arab popular culture and, by extension, investing popular culture with the power to both reflect and produce new forms of engagement. Writing on the subject of love and sexuality, El Saadawi points to the mixed messages available to men and women: on the subject of love, writes El Saadawi, young women are forbidden to learn about sex and yet the culture around them incessantly prepares them for marriage. As El Saadawi reminds us, ‘love and yearning are a constant theme in Arab songs and films and leave a deep impression on the mental and emotional make-up of a girl’. In The Hidden Face of Eve, El Saadawi argues that:

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Contemporary Arab women writers The social forces that oppose true equality for women still have recourse to moral and religious values. And yet everyday these very values are violated on the screens of cinemas and television sets, and on the posters of commercial advertisements, the pages of political and social studies and through floods of pornographic literature and a never ending stream of songs and radio broadcasts. And yet here again the men who represent these social forces remains silent, and sometimes even participate openly or indirectly in propagating ideas which are the negation of the principle they profess.30

El Saadawi points out that these mixed messages result in generations of men and women who participate in obsessive and unhealthy relationships.31 ‘Action’, she writes, ‘is an essential element of love. Romantic love or – Houb Ozri [a love defined by inaction] – is fundamentally a sick emotion, since it is deprived of the quality of action’ (p. 74): Arabic art and literature have played, and continue to play, a crucial role in emphasizing attitudes and concepts like these regarding beauty in women. A never-ending stream of songs, poems and novels sing the praises of the girl with the flowing hair, long eyelashes and an appealing fullness of the lips and breasts . . . Many an Arab girl or woman ends up with some form or other of psychological disorder because of the severe contradictions to which she is exposed. Arab songs and literature unceasingly swamp her senses with associations and feelings related to love. Yet if she responds to the call of love, then punishment and reprobation is swift and merciless. (p. 78) El Saadawi sees in many institutions, be they social or cultural, prohibitive tendencies. In her early novels however, El Saadawi seeks to construct characters who awaken to the paradoxes inherent in social or cultural institutions. Through this action, El Saadawi creates a human dignity – what ought to be the original state for all – especially for women; she offers a way of humanising women as women through their own terms and definitions.

El Saadawi’s avowals The three works of fiction that I look at deal at length with the issue of how gender is understood and configured. As we ask more and more questions and probe further into the categories and possibilities that make us the gender we are, there is a need to seek these questions in the fictions of the ‘other’, to locate a possible transnational affirmation of the certainty of certain concepts underlying gender constructions. Much of El Saadawi’s fiction anticipates ideas theorised by Western feminism that are nevertheless ideas not always confronted by an Arab feminism. In a sense, what we lack by way of a theory of Arab women’s writing is expressed in fictional narrative. El Saadawi’s characters perform the realisation of gender construction and force us to question the basis on

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which those realisations depend. I am reminded, when reading El Saadawi, of some of the compelling demands that Butler makes: If the performative must compel collective recognition in order to work, must it compel only those kinds of recognition that are already institutionalized, or can it also compel a critical perspective on existing institutions? What is the performative power of claiming an entitlement to those terms – ‘justice’, ‘democracy’ – that have been articulated to exclude the ones who now claim that entitlement? What is the performative power of calling for freedom or the end to racism precisely when the one or the ‘we’ who calls has been radically disenfranchised from making such a call, when the ‘we’ who makes the call reterritorializes the term from its operation within dominant discourse precisely in order to counter the effects of that group’s marginalization? (p. 158) When reading El Saadawi’s earlier work, it appears that her characters negotiate an understanding of their position in the world whilst simultaneously coming to terms with how they have arrived at this position. Weighing up their civil liberties and rights, they also articulate the panic experienced at the moment where they attempt to voice their understanding – who will hear them and can they be heard? Does their voice matter? This realisation is experienced as terror, the terror of finding that no one is listening. I think these are crucial questions that cannot be limited to ‘Arab women’ or categorized as ‘voices from the Arab world’. These are concerns that demand critical attention, for they probe fundamentally into the forms that the experience of gender, oppression and poverty take. I see an affinity between the anxieties expressed by El Saadawi’s characters and the wider political and social commentary articulated in Butler’s work. Though I am not suggesting that El Saadawi’s characters are mouthpieces for ideological concepts, I do think that the style and subject matter of the novels prefigures an anxiety with the normative constraints frequently critiqued in feminist theory. That these ideas or concepts appear in the form of characters is perhaps what has disconcerted previous readers. I might suggest here that the novels be read as voices depicting a variety of sentiments and reasoning that are just beginning to understand their constitutive role in a tightly woven society. El Saadawi produces characters who, in effect, in Butler’s words, ‘expos[e] [the] prevailing forms of authority and the exclusions by which they proceed’, (p. 158) or, in other words, experience and articulate moments where sexual difference is recognised for what it is – an exclusionary and restrictive force, and the routes available (or unavailable) away from the horror of this knowledge. In the early fiction discussed here, El Saadawi’s three heroines are plagued by the familiar crisis of women who begin to question discriminatory behaviour based on gender. In Two Women in One, Bahiah is a young girl forced into medical school to please her family; the protagonist of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor

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studies medicine feverishly, mistakenly believing that it is the tool that will make her equal in the eyes of her family and society. Lastly, Woman at Point Zero is the story of a psychiatrist desperate to see an imprisoned prostitute awaiting her death sentence. In the three texts, the women ask difficult questions about their sexual awakening, social roles and methods of rebellion. They learn the contradictory and confusing nature of communication and see in their physicality what it is that makes them diverse; they learn to question, rebel and shock. Though my analysis will mainly concentrate on Woman at Point Zero, I want nevertheless to argue that all the female characters find themselves involved in complex dilemmas where everything that they do or say is viewed in terms of restrictions that they have had to overcome. Femininity is a burden, as is poverty, and El Saadawi’s characters persistently question the social and cultural authority that has produced and then abandoned them.

Early novels In her introduction to the French translation of Woman at Point Zero (Imra’a ‘ind Nuqtat al-Sifr in Arabic, which translates literally as woman at point zero) Algerian novelist Assia Djebar makes some gripping, far-reaching claims: What is a feminist novel in Arabic? First of all, it is a voice – here, a voice in ‘hell’ of a woman called Paradise – a night murmur . . . an ancient wound finally and gradually opened up to assume its song . . . it is no longer a question of explaining, of justifying the challenge. It is enough that there is a challenge in this confession of one woman to another. It is enough that the challenge of the feminine voice rises higher and higher with a throbbing energy . . . we, from the Maghrib . . . find inspiration at hearing a woman revolt in Arabic. A new, fresh discursive field is imperceptibly traced for other Arab women. A point for take-off. A combat zone. A restoration of body. (My emphasis)32 Djebar’s compelling statements place El Saadawi’s novel unequivocally in a feminist frame and bestow on it a pedagogical as well as an inspirational quality. They also position El Saadawi as a fighter whose words are a call to combat; this is heightened through Djebar’s translation of the title: Ferdaous: Une Voix a` l’Enfer (translated as Ferdaous: A Voice from Hell). This is intriguing, as Djebar here prefigures for the reader the circumstances that they are about to read and frames these circumstances as uncompromisingly brutal – from hell, or alternatively, (a` l’Enfer) to hell. Whichever direction one chooses, Djebar’s positioning of El Saadawi as a mother figure inaugurating the rigorous questioning of equality and justice through a depiction of hellish circumstances, reflects the authority of the text to speak to many. ‘This book is dealing with birth’, writes Djebar, ‘birth of a word’ (p. 388). Djebar’s understanding of El Saadawi’s narrative technique is astute and illuminating:33

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The writing itself is marked by points which cut up and interrupt the flow of the narrative. I notice them in this compulsive repetition of somatic notations first in the interior of the phrase, then in the paragraph, then in the chapter, finally in the entire dialogue.34 The plot as such does not develop untroubled, as El Saadawi sacrifices this to permit the intrusion of these ‘somatic notations’ or ciphers that indicate moments that are integral to our appreciation of the events and experiences represented. For example, Djebar points towards the ‘purifying poverty’ of the scene where the psychiatrist and prisoner meet for the first time (the empty cell, the bare earth). This reminds me of Mohanty’s call towards the site of poverty, so that, in her words, we can ‘read up the ladder of privileges’.35 Though the characters do not quite act as symbols, the narrative is ‘marked’ by symbolic tableaux vivants. However, Firdaus’s narrative, for Djebar, very much enacts how something originary (pleasure, desire) is taken away by the ‘patriarchal, marital, police, bureaucratic, [and] political system’ and how it is ‘the memory of her body’ that gives her ‘courage’ and ‘latent strength’ to question the restrictions placed on her (p. 389). As Saliba suggests, while these systems ‘assume control over women’s bodies, [they] cannot exercise dominance over her mind and spirit, nor, more significantly, over her voice’.36 Though it is unclear what would designate the circumstances in El Saadawi’s early novels as particularly Arab (the characters do not make clear these associations), her location as an Egyptian woman who writes in Arabic and who partakes in a critique of strong masculinist ideology designates her as an Arab feminist. When I read El Saadawi, however, I partake in transnational practice without labelling this or that action as specifically and particularly Arab or for Arabs – I try to learn from it and engage with it; how else can the work of Arab women writers and feminists enter the wider sphere if they are not actively engaged with, not as indicators or repositories of this or that truism, but as equal players in wider feminist practices?37 As Grewal and Kaplan observe in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ‘the question becomes how to link diverse feminisms without requiring either equivalence or a master theory. How to make these links without replicating cultural and economic hegemony.’38 One way to do this is to participate in the text’s construction of itself as a global or universal product – one that reflects on its particular context yet dramatically points outwards towards contexts unknown. Though this has been an approach that has been carried out with much First World literature, I find that it has happened much less with other world literatures, in particular with Arab women’s writing. In Woman at Point Zero, a psychiatrist who attempts to visit a woman convicted of murder and waiting to be executed is overwhelmed by a strange feeling of inferiority when faced with the possibility that this woman might somehow be more human than herself: It looked to me as though this woman who had killed a human being, and was shortly to be killed herself, was a better person than I. Compared to

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Contemporary Arab women writers her, I was nothing but a small insect crawling upon the land amidst millions of other insects.39

Here, Firdaus, whom we have yet to meet, is conceptualised in terms of her otherworldliness in a world where killing for justice is comprehensible. Her actions are not to be judged by the world that cannot accept her actions, actions that, we later learn, come as a result of not being treated humanely. ‘I was seized by a feeling’, writes the narrator, ‘very close to certainty, yet difficult to explain, that she was in fact, better than all the women and men we normally hear about, or see, or know.’40 The sense that Firdaus’s experience has somehow elevated her, or spirited her away from this world, casts a shadow of anxiety and insecurity over earthly values exhibited as natural and for all. This anxiety is compounded for the psychiatrist by her uneasy feelings towards the prison warder, who manifests some sort of instinct that connects her to Firdaus: ‘the warder was bent double, scrubbing the tiled floor of the corridor. I was overcome by an unusual contempt towards her. She was no more than a woman cleaning the prison floor. She could not read or write and knew nothing about psychology, so how was it that I had so easily believed her feelings could be true?’ Here, shocked that an uneducated and poor woman has some kind of ‘access’ to knowledge not available to her as a ‘researcher in science’ is crushing.41 El Saadawi shrewdly positions an educated, worldly woman against those who have nothing. In so doing, she is surely asking us to judge the difference not only between the haves and the have-nots, but between what constitutes knowledge and justice. Waiting to see Firdaus is like waiting to have an audience with truth, a truth that cannot be learnt, bought or even discovered, it can only be experienced: ‘I was full of a wonderful feeling, proud, elated, happy . . . I held the whole world in my hands; it was mine. It was a feeling I had known only once before, many years ago. I was on my way to meet the first man I loved for the first time.’42 Here, access to Firdaus’s story almost performs a response to Spivak’s formulation, ‘can the subaltern speak?’43 The psychiatrist, desperate to hear this woman’s story, in which she has invested the meaning of ‘the whole world’, can only now listen: ‘let me speak. Do not interrupt me. I have no time to listen to you,’ says Firdaus, whilst the psychiatrist listens to Firdaus’s unearthly voice: ‘Her voice too was like the voices one hears in a dream.’44 This exchange, where the privileged, safe, educated woman listens to the hellish life Firdaus has left, provides for a stunning education in the hypocrisy underlying societal values, underscored and maintained by unequal power relations. It also enacts the call to universalism that I indicated above. There is very little that links Firdaus and the doctor in terms of nationality and cultural affiliation (hence my hesitation in limiting El Saadawi’s text to an exclusively Arab framework). What does link them is their gender and it is this affinity that provokes Firdaus’s recounting of her story. Power relations are enacted in all three novels through the bond that the heroines have with the memory of their mothers’ bodies and through their relationship to food. In Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, a novel that follows a woman’s

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awakening to a realisation of her gendered position and her place in society, the desire to eat freely overwhelms the heroine, as it is through eating that she can confound restrictive norms: I forgot my mother’s instructions about how a girl should eat, and the medical profession’s warning about butter and cream, and stuffed my mouth with food. I drank cold water from an earthenware jug, making a loud noise and spilling water all down my clothes. I ate till my hunger was satisfied and drank till my thirst was quenched.45 Food here further signifies the restricted existence of women and, overwhelmingly, an economy over which they have no control. In Woman at Point Zero, the psychiatrist listens to Firdaus speak of being intimidated into an unwanted marriage. From a poor background, with few prospects, an unsuitable husband is nevertheless perceived as a solution. Firdaus suffers his relentless spying on her eating habits, the quality and quantity consumed. Firdaus provides/is a commodity (her body) and is in turn provided for (nourishment to sustain this body). Watched over as she eats, Firdaus finds it impossible to take pleasure in eating. Like Firdaus, food has to be controlled, and waste is not acceptable. Here, poverty is used as an excuse to further limit the most basic of human actions: eating. As Firdaus says of her cruel husband: ‘He kept looking at my plate while I ate, and if I left anything over he picked it up, put it in his mouth and after swallowing, quickly told me off for my wastefulness’: When the dustman came to empty the refuse from the bin, he would go through it carefully before putting it out on the landing. One day he discovered some leftover scraps of food, and started yelling at me so loudly, that all the neighbours could hear. After this incident, he got into the habit of beating me whether he had a reason for it or not.46 It is only when Firdaus turns to prostitution and earns her own money that she is able to enjoy the food that is hers (as well as the partial freedom that comes with economic independence). To obtain pleasure from food, unrestricted, is a pleasure unequalled. Money can and does change her life and the experience of having it fills her with a ‘feeling of wonder’ and she is bemused by the fact that the ten-pound note could feel as ‘illicit and forbidden as the thrill of sacrilegious pleasure’ (my emphases).47 Firdaus, and in turn El Saadawi, thinks beyond the immediate physical relief that food provides. She expands the social and cultural meaning of food and claims that it is a delight like that of ‘sacrilegious pleasure’, like something forbidden that can finally be a source of pleasure. ‘I realized this was the first time in my life I was eating without being watched by two eyes gazing into my plate to see how much food I took,’ says Firdaus, after which she ceases to ‘bend [her] head or look away’. Instead, she is able to ‘walk through the streets with [her] head held high, and [her] eyes looking straight ahead’.48 Food is synonymous with those who have control in the community. In Men,

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Woman and God(s), Malti-Doulgas states that ‘one bodily function, sex, thus permits the accomplishment of another, equally important function: eating’, thus linking the two activities.49 As Lyn Innes has noted in her essay ‘Conspicuous Consumption: Corruption and the Body Politic in the Writing of Ayi Kwei Armah and Ama Ata Aidoo’: The recurring analogy between eating, temptation, desire and corruption, of necessity implies the inevitability of corruption, since man must eat, food must be digested, and finally evacuated. Nowhere is there pleasure in eating: food can never be an end in itself, but is always a mere necessity for the poor, and a sign of status for the wealthy.50 Here, the poor, and poor women in particular, must take their relationship to food as indicative of their status, of their enforced dependency. There is no pleasure in eating for any of the women except when it is released from its connotation as a masculine activity. In Two Women in One, Bahiah, a young medical student coming to terms with her sense of individuality, is disgusted when her mother stuffs her with sweets. The idea of authority and force, inevitably it seems, permeates the activity of eating. As Elspeth Probyn has reaffirmed in her article ‘Beyond Food/Sex: Eating and an Aesthetics of Existence’, although the act of eating is a physical event, ‘food is a hugely powerful system of values, regulations and beliefs; in short a system of representation that hides its nature in appeals to immediacy and non-mediation’.51 Therefore, though it seems to be an individual and biologically necessary act, eating and food also function within the matrices of power and social values. Bahiah’s mother may understand food giving as an act of love and sharing, yet Bahiah cannot understand it but as an act of violence, and for Bahiah it reflects on her mother’s inability to reflect on her feminine condition. Here again, the associations with being a female are connected to consumption and how this relates to feelings of marginality and discrimination on the basis of an as yet not understood discriminating factor, that of gender. In Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, the heroine, connecting gender and food, observes that: My brother took a bigger piece of meat than me, gobbled it up and drank his soup noisily and my mother never said a word. But I was different: I was a girl. I had to watch every movement that I made, hide my longing for the food, eat slowly and drink my soup without a sound . . . because I was girl. I wept over my femininity even before I knew what it was. The moment I opened my eyes on life, a state of enmity already existed between me and my nature. (My emphasis)52 This observation begs the examination of the power of this ‘femininity’ to precede linguistic understanding. Even before acquiring self-knowledge, she is faced with the impossible task of understanding herself as ‘feminine’, something she knows nothing of and the parameters of which she does not yet understand,

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though somehow intuits. Of course, this retrospective narrative reports from a position of hindsight, yet the choice of phrase is still significant: ‘before I knew what it was’. Here, becoming a woman and the reality of that womanhood is configured both before and after a sense of what this will mean. In Woman at Point Zero and Two Women in One, Firdaus and Bahiah significantly dream of a reunion with their mothers, or more specifically, their mothers’ bodies. These imagined reunions supplant the need for self-affirmation and the search for individuality. I find this interesting in that this fantasy may also indicate the desire not to struggle (thereby firmly defying femininity and womanhood as the site for struggle). In Two Women in One, we learn that Bahiah ‘somehow knew instinctively that her mother’s body was the only thing that understood her’, yet her mother is powerless to help Bahiah in her quest for selfknowledge:53 From childhood she had felt the tragedy of her own body, carrying it with her at every step and every cell. She burned with desire to return to where she had come from, to escape the field of gravity and free herself of that body whose own weight, surface and boundaries divided it from its surroundings: a consuming desire to dissolve like particles of air in the universe, to reach a final, total vanishing point. (My emphasis)54 Here, the comfort of the mother’s body acts as a protection that does not participate in the economy of exchange, and asks for nothing in return. Does the site of the mother’s body become the impossible site of protection, then?55 Bahiah’s hope for unity or escape is located within the quintessentially safe area of the womb – a place removed from action. In a desperate attempt to engage in political activity in the hope that this might result in some sense of purpose, Bahiah goes public and joins a political, anti-colonial demonstration that ultimately promises a unity that Bahiah craves but which it cannot, perhaps predictably, fulfil. Here, political mobilisation does not offer safety and tenderness: So great was the chorus that at first she could not make out the words of the slogan. Then the word ‘Egypt’ rang out. Not the ‘Egypt’ she was used to hearing from her father, mother, teacher, or fellow students, but ‘Egypt’ in that strong mighty voice that filled the world and shook the earth and the skies. A shiver passed through her body and her hair stood on end. She felt a soft, warm motion under her eyelids like tears, and childhood images flashed before her eyes, rippling and dissolving as if under water: her mother’s warm breast and the smell of milk as she lay in her arms.56 It is important that the image of the nation is immediately followed by the image of the mother’s breast. Where and to whom does Bahiah belong? If the two moments slip into each other so easily does this denote the inherent unsteadiness of them as signifiers or do they both emerge as impossible, empty promises? The nation and the maternal offer conflicting promises they cannot

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deliver. Essentially, the material ties to both remain imaginary yet destructive, in Bahiah’s case. As she struggles with meaning and direction, Bahiah grasps at whatever seems to offer these. Similarly, Firdaus as a young woman in Woman at Point Zero wonders if she can still recognise her mother: My mother was no longer there, but instead there was another woman who hit me on my hand and took the mug away from me. My father told me she was my mother. In fact, she looked exactly like my mother, the same long garments, the same face and the same way of moving. But when I used to look into her eyes I could feel she was not my mother. They were not the eyes that held me up each time I was on the point of falling.57 Firdaus’s mother is either a broken woman, unable to recognise her own child, or has died and been replaced. The psychiatrist understands (through Firdaus’s story) that women have indeed become interchangeable, no longer recognised for anything but their biological femininity and its associations (for what they can provide). The mother, significantly, can be any woman and all women, in the sense that she cannot fulfil the needs of the child. Broken and incapable of offering anything to their children, the older women in El Saadawi’s works abandon the role of nurturer. They emerge as inescapably steeped in a restricting tradition that promotes husband seeking as the only means of obtaining selfworth. In Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, the heroine has a much more troubled relationship with her mother and views her as the repository and enforcer of patriarchal laws. In one memorable incident, her grandmother stares at her sprouting breasts and thinks that this is now the right time for her to ‘put on [her] cream dress and go and say hello to [her] father’s guests in the sittingroom’. Wondering ‘why the cream dress?’ she soon realises that ‘it had a strange gather at the front which made my breasts look larger’ (my emphasis). She refuses to wear the dress and thinks she can win approval through her intelligence. As her father sings her academic praises, the friends throw ‘inquiring glances . . . all over [her] body before coming to rest on [her] chest’. Disappointed and shocked by the lack of interest in her intellectual abilities, the young heroine imagines the moment of her conception as an ‘involuntary’ act played out ‘in a random moment of pleasure’. Sex is here viewed as a random act that results in complex realities. Here, she transforms the reaction of the men to her and her reaction to them to create a template of how sexual relations actually function. Her disgust at the men’s reaction forms the basis for a distaste of sex and she repositions herself against all other women that ‘believe in worthless trivia’.58 In contrast, Bahiah in Two Women in One repeatedly dreams of her mother, a figure who can offer an alternative to a difficult life: She wanted to curl up like a foetus. Her body shook with a strange violent yearning for security. She longed to curl up in her mother’s womb, to feel security, silence, with no sound or movement. Her mother’s big arms embraced her with amazing strength, pulling her body towards her once

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more. With all her might she tried to make their bodies one, but in vain. The eternal separation took place in a fleeting moment never to return.59 Here, an unobtainable dream of a return to the still, silent womb protects against the confusing and hypocritical surroundings that cannot accommodate complex reasoning. The presence of a void, of something that cannot be expressed (something that cannot be defined by the gender distinctions that are always already in place) seems to permeate the text. This void acts, I think, to offer spaces for alternatives that struggle to emerge but cannot. On the day of her wedding, images of death pervade, as everything about the ceremony symbolises destruction and death. Bahiah feels as though she has been auctioned off and, like her counterpart in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, likens signing her marriage certificate to signing her death warrant. She feels as though her dress is ‘smothering’ her and its tail folds ‘like a coffin’. ‘The bridal stage, surrounded by roses, looked like the grave of the unknown soldier.’ The drums sound like ‘funeral strains’. When they are ready to proceed to the new house, Bahiah feels as though the car that will take her there is indeed a police car, no better than the car that was responsible for taking her to the police station after her arrest for participating in the demonstration. The perception of the car reinforces the paternal law that she has been unable to relinquish; she is ‘property’, to be moved and traded at will.60 Once home, Bahiah soon understands that she is now expected to perform the role of dutiful and sexual wife. Bahiah’s resistance to these expectations leads her to shun her new husband’s sexual advances. After every institution has failed her, Bahiah clutches at meaning anywhere and everywhere. Suppression is everywhere and is understood as the cause of hypocrisy and hatred. Bahiah is defeated, yet does not allow herself to live within the fiction that she has revealed. The text performs her disappointment by not allowing her to envision a different ending, a new possibility. El Saadawi’s novel Two Women in One is testimony to the difficulty of revealing the fiction that is womanhood. In a sense, she cannot envision a brighter future for Bahiah because the shock is too overwhelming, the sense of loss too immense. The text, in offering no alternative, performs the destructive as well as the creative forces that it is capable of. It pronounces on the difficulties of trying to capture meaning whilst simultaneously being precluded from the construction of this meaning. The psychiatrist, through the experience of Firdaus, the convicted killer in Woman at Point Zero, understands the power of a discourse that can destroy the material body. Although she begins with a semi-defined certainty of her role as physician (a certainty overcome with reason) she is lulled into another woman’s experience through the art of storytelling. In simple but not unimportant terms, Firdaus tells her story to the psychiatrist. Although Firdaus speaks to the psychiatrist, who later transcribes the story, it is difficult for me to see what MaltiDouglas has termed an ‘empowerment’ that Firdaus achieves in the presence of the physician.61 On the contrary, I want to argue that by listening to the narrative of Firdaus the physician is then able to transform what she has heard into

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a powerful narrative that empowers her; let us not forget that the doctor is moved by Firdaus before they even meet, and thus affected by her story before she has even heard it. Firdaus’s story obliges the physician to question what it is that her own training has taught her about sex and gender roles. The psychiatrist in a sense listens to the story in order to understand herself, in order to give meaning to her life. Firdaus tells her story on the eve of her execution, thereby, as I understand it, dramatising her death and giving to others a renewed understanding of the hellish origins of life. Interestingly, Firdaus begins her story by revisiting her earliest sexual sensation. As a circumcised woman,62 Firdaus’s recollections of bodily pleasures are vague and infantile, yet serve as a possibility against which she can measure her later, failed attempt to ‘reach the pleasure that [is] not there’.63 Nevertheless, as Djebar notes: ‘it is as though Ferdous were finding again courage and latent strength in the memory of her body’ (p. 389). Aware that there is some physical feature of her body that has been removed and which she associates with pleasure, yet unaware of the exact connections between this and her subsequent experiences, Firdaus is nevertheless moved by this memory or dream. As Judith Butler has insightfully theorised: What is refused or repudiated in the formation of the subject continues to determine that subject. What remains outside this subject, set aside by the act of foreclosure which founds the subject, persists as a kind of defining negativity. The subject, as a result, is never coherent and never self-identical precisely because it is founded and, indeed, continually refounded, through a set of defining foreclosures and repressions that constitute the discontinuity and incompletion of the subject.64 A certain understanding of sexuality is foreclosed at the site of Firdaus’s excision,65 which cannot be effectively retrieved. This somewhat situates her story within the framework of a lost pleasure that she continues to seek throughout the novel and that stands in for irretrievable experiences or an unimaginable life that reflects back to her an unrecognisable image. Shocked and repulsed by how closely she resembles her parents, Firdaus is ‘filled with a deep hatred for the mirror’ that does not reflect an image of herself that she imagines.66 This disjunction between how Firdaus conceptualises herself and how this jars with the image others have of her inevitably results in her struggle to maintain a hold on reality. In a sense, it is an intriguing aspect of the narrative that Firdaus becomes a prostitute, where the act of prostitution replaces other defining characteristics of the woman who practices it.67 On one occasion Firdaus is forced to pretend that she feels pleasure. This is significant as a false jouissance is imposed, because it figures, imaginatively, in the orgasm of the other – the narcissistic fact that the other can give pleasure, even in paid sex, becomes part of the sexual exchange, yet not part of the experience for the prostitute Firdaus. As El Saadawi has pointed out in relation to the prostitute-heroine in Arab literature in her polemic The Hidden Face of Eve:

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It is ironic . . . that the woman prostitute plays a much more important role in Arabic Literature than that which is accorded to the pure and virtuous woman. It is as though purity and virtue are not attractive enough to evoke interest, whether in real life or in the stories of men and women conjured up by an artist’s imagination. The prostitute seems to symbolize real woman, woman without a veil or mask. She is a real woman for she has lifted the mask of deceit from her face and no longer feels a need to pretend that she is in love, or to simulate virtue and devotion’ (My emphasis).68 If the essence of the prostitute, someone with no purity or virtue, is the real essence of woman (because she has taken off the mask of falseness) then what of the prostitute who enacts what is desired of her? The prostitute shows the performance to be just that, a performance. What seems to emerge from this argument is that ideas of love, virtue and devotion are masks that the prostitute strips from her face, thus making her real. This would suggest that virtue and purity are qualities that are not available within the matrix of ‘womanhood’ and that, essentially, all women can be viewed as prostitutes. What I am arguing is that if the only representation of an uninhibited woman is the prostitute, and the prostitute herself performs what is desired of her, then how can we distinguish authenticity from gender performance (or are we to assume there is no public identity beyond this)? I sense that El Saadawi ridicules fiction that requires such a complicated configuration.69 Surely love, virtue and devotion are not always emotions of pretence, yet who ridicules them most but the woman who is a prostitute, who can apply them at will? Who else can perform these qualities in an imaginary exchange in a full understanding of her role but the woman whose work is prostitution? It is here that I feel Firdaus emerges as an agent of ‘empowerment’ exposing a knowledge of performance and producing transcultural knowledge of our implication and participation in these structures of meaning. Firdaus, after escaping her intolerable husband and before taking up work as a prostitute, is taken in by a man who seems to sympathise with her desolate circumstances.70 After installing her in his home as servant, he begins to sleep with her and begins to call her a ‘street walker’ and ‘low woman’ when she asks him to find her work.71 Firdaus escapes into the comfort of the street because she is unable to conceptualise herself as a low woman or a streetwalker and not necessarily because she is sexually exploited. As she tell us, until named a low woman Firdaus had never imagined herself to be one. Instead, her self-image was one of a used and abused woman with little education and no opportunity to gain work. Being called a ‘low woman’ makes her confront the fact that this is possibly what she is viewed as, an image that she in no way had attached to herself. The pain and irreversible damage of this form of hate speech is to set the pattern for Firdaus’s further encounters with ongoing verbal abuse. As Butler has argued, ‘If we are formed in language, then that formative power precedes and conditions any decision we might make about it, insulting us from the start, as it were, by its prior power.’72 When Firdaus escapes from another

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abusive situation she encounters a policeman who threatens to arrest her if she does not come back to his house with him: You’re a prostitute, and it’s my duty to arrest you, and others of your kind. To clean up the country, and protect respectable families from the likes of you. But I don’t want to use force. Perhaps we can agree quietly without a fuss. I’ll give you a pound: a whole pound. What do you say to that?73 The law desires and punishes at the same time, thus maintaining the institution of Law through the fear of law breaking. Ironically, though Firdaus pollutes the country, she is good enough to exploit. Fearing arrest, she submits.74 That same night, alone in the rainy streets, she is propositioned by a man who is obviously wealthy. She accepts his suggestion and, upon leaving his house in the morning, he gives her a ten-pound note. Finally, Firdaus feels as though a shroud has been moved away from her eyes and she can finally see and understand; primarily that she has some value, or can demand some value, within the confines of how she is understood as woman (in this sense, prostitute). This, ultimately, constitutes the difference, what makes her seek independence, and finally what turns a cheap act into a worthy one. Morality is no longer a factor in the economy of exchange. The fact that sex is what is being exchanged demands that we revisit our ideas regarding women’s bodies as commodities when the bodies are knowingly used. When propositioned again, Firdaus declines the man who offers ten pounds, yet sleeps with the man who offers her twenty. An unforgettable lesson is learnt and Firdaus firmly establishes herself within an economy in which she constitutes herself as a necessary commodity. However, fulfilment is incomplete, as Firdaus continues to seek a worthwhile reason to live for. Though she becomes a successful prostitute she remains haunted by the possible judgement that may come from others, though, significantly, she does not judge herself. Firdaus’s fear of misnomy, what Butler calls ‘hate speech’ and what Sara Ahmed termed ‘words that wound’ (see above), instils a desire to do something more, to try and be respectable. This action is occasioned when a customer breaks the ‘sex for money pattern’ and declares that he would rather speak to her as opposed to have anonymous sex with her. Firdaus, surprised, informs her client that he will nevertheless have to pay for her time. Disgusted, he cries out: ‘You make me feel I’m in a clinic. Why don’t you hang up a price list in the waiting room? Do you also have emergency visits?’ There was a note of irony in his voice, but I could not see why, so I said, ‘Are you being sarcastic about my work, or about the medical profession?’ ‘Both,’ he said. Are they similar to one another?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘except that a doctor while carrying out his duties feels he’s worthy of respect.’ ‘What about me?’ I exclaimed.

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‘You are not respectable,’ he replied, but before the words ‘not respectable’ had even reached my ears, my hands rose to cover them quickly, but they penetrated into my head like the sharp tip of a plunging dagger . . . ‘Why then do you join in it with me?’ (My emphases)75 This statement presumes that the prostitute has no right to feel that she is worthy of respect. It is precisely this that Firdaus objects to. When she does not offer emotion, and demands pay, she is acting within the remit of her profession; a prostitute offering sex for money. The client, in this case, forces an interpretation which equates her with an unfeeling medical profession that however assumes itself worthy of respect. Whereas the prostitute is chastised for this aspect of her business which actually adheres to the parameters of a consumer scheme (in terms of a demand and supply), the customer nevertheless retains the power to pronounce on questions of respectability. Horrified by the possibility that she does not deserve respect, an idea that had not as yet constituted part of her economy as prostitute, Firdaus is unable to process this judgement. When she asks her client why he joins her in this disrespectful ‘work’ he tries to take her by force, refiguring her position as a helpless woman and his as an instinctual being. Being called ‘disrespectful’ places Firdaus within a system of value and morality in which she has no direct participation, yet by which she is scrutinised. Being a prostitute in this sense becomes akin to being a disrespectful woman, a link neither obvious nor commensurate to Firdaus’s experience. Compelled to seek exactly what would elicit this respect, Firdaus temporarily abandons prostitution for a secretarial job. Three years into the company, though, Firdaus decides that ‘as a prostitute [she] had been looked upon with more respect, and been valued more highly’. She witnesses women employees selling themselves for a very low price, for a meal or for job assurance, and can only feel disgust. In her ruthless world, where poverty is to be feared more than a useless notion of chastity, it is not what you do but what you can extract for what you do. ‘I came to realise that a female employee is more afraid of losing her job than a prostitute is of losing her life.’76 Although Firdaus falls in love, she is again betrayed when her lover marries another without her knowledge. She bitterly concludes that ‘a successful prostitute [is] better than a misled saint’ and returns to her former life.77 As a prostitute, Firdaus’s success is widespread and one day she is asked to visit a prominent visiting figure of state, as an act of patriotism. She refuses, claiming that she ‘knew nothing of patriotism, that [her]country had not only given [her] nothing, but had also taken away anything [she] may have had, including [her] honour and dignity’. Here, Firdaus rejects the machinery of the state that equates patriotism with the granting of sexual favours Patriotism again appears as a concept used to suppress the poor into their servile positions and to limit the possibilities of woman. It is invoked, however, to promote and mobilise women to their most material use: that of sex object. Firdaus refuses, and reminds the psychiatrist

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that ‘he wanted to take a prostitute to this important personality’s bed, like any common pimp would do, and yet talk[ed] in dignified tones of patriotism and moral principles’. In fact, Firdaus’s destruction finally comes with her refusal to succumb to the threats of a pimp who offers her protection though she needs none. The pimp appears as an amalgam of all the restricting figures in her life that have tried to essentialise her existence. By demanding a cut of her income, he again highlights the realities of ownership and production at the same time that Firdaus reiterates, ‘My body was my property alone.’78 Though Firdaus understands the huge implications of this statement, in her reiteration of it she retains the ability to demarcate a space out of discourse by creating that space through the actual use of an economic term. She makes money through the use of her body, and in this very material sense her body is hers. Here, Firdaus’s actions reveal the limits of justice and the complete absence of civil liberties. When she refuses to give in to the pimp’s requests, he threatens her life and when she questions him, he beats her. When she prepares to leave her life as a prostitute to rid herself of him, he moves to stop her and raises a knife. She is quicker and stabs him first. When Firdaus is arrested she plays her final card: ‘I am a killer, but I’ve committed no crime . . . to be a criminal one must be a man’.79 Without fear of death, Firdaus accepts her death sentence and awaits the end. Firdaus, like an ‘Antigone’ figure, appeals to a sense of justice beyond the manmade laws. While both are technically guilty – and accept this – their cases show up the inadequacy of the law.80

And they die of desire for us What pervades all the texts is the somatic impact of poverty, social class and local as well as global forms of patriarchy. In Two Women in One, detained for her involvement in a nationalist demonstration, Bahiah sits among women arrested for prostitution. Their dialogue reveals telling remarks on the workings of the dominant class and the exploitation of women: ‘When will God have mercy on us?’ ‘God is pleased with us all right.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Sure, we’re the best of women.’ ‘I feel better now.’ ‘Without us honorable husbands would have died and respectable households might have collapsed.’ ‘But they hate our smell . . . ’ ‘Because it’s their real smell.’ ‘And they put us in prison.’ ‘Because we know what their genitals look like.’ ‘They’re scared to death of us.’ ‘And they die of desire for us.’81

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These ‘voices’ demonstrate the crux of the arguments that I feel run throughout all the texts here. They embody the discrepancies and contradictions encountered by all of the women in their diverse experiences. Social custom requires that prostitutes exist for reasons explained above and yet arrests prostitutes and brings them in and away from the public for these same reasons. Though men are ‘scared to death’ they also ‘die of desire’, performing both roles at once; simultaneously, the prostitutes act as repulsions and attractions. Being both is a complex figuring of what El Saadawi tries to capture in her texts. She reuses the prostitute figure to highlight the incongruous expectations placed on her, to be desired and desiring, loathsome and loathed. In short, the prostitute contains all possibilities because she can perform all gender requirements, keeping herself a secret that cannot be told (because possibly there is no secret to tell?) and simultaneously ridiculing the law and its purposes. To conclude, I have explored how the early fiction of Nawal El Saadawi engages and foregrounds issues that resonate beyond the local. It is, I think, through the medium of fictional narrative (that attempts to make possible the impossible) rather than a strictly defined feminism, that effectiveness can be achieved. Though many more issues are raised in the novels than can be covered here, those themes approached have preoccupied many feminist and gender theorists at various points in their discourse. To find them in these works of fiction is to acknowledge that, thematically, the Third World/postcolonial woman is more than aware of the web of intricate regulations and paradigms that make her what she is. Much of El Saadawi’s work is open to broad interpretation and can be used to demonstrate the potential for a universal feminism that seeks these spaces of experience from which to construct a ‘universal’ or global discourse on women. Djebar, in her closing remarks on Woman at Point Zero, poignantly writes: Before travelling through the pages that follow and pursuing Ferdous’ journey through hell, I dream suddenly of the first origin – alas, lost, or perhaps to be found some day – of our women’s literary tradition. (p. 392) Whereas Djebar has gone some way towards recuperating and imagining this literary tradition, her recognition of El Saadawi’s voice in its enactment of ‘sexual misery and oppression’ gestures towards its worldly quality, its value outside of a narrow Arab tradition (p. 392). Though El Saadawi’s later work becomes more sensitive to political and theological debates, the three novels that I have touched on here point towards wider preoccupations with the articulation of women’s freedoms and place in humanity. I am not certain that it is possible to speak of a postcolonial feminism without referring to El Saadawi’s polemics and her early fiction. To do so would be tantamount to ignoring an organising principle around which I hope much Arab women’s writing is forming: that of a productive solidarity that risks exposing the local in order to engage at the global level. To cite Grewal and Kaplan:

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Contemporary Arab women writers We need to articulate the relationship of gender to scattered hegemonies such as global economic structures, patriarchal nationalisms, ‘authentic’ forms of tradition, local structures of domination, and legal–juridical oppression on multiple levels.82

It is to El Saadawi’s credit that these issues effectively converge in her fiction.

3

Danger and creativity Lebanese war novelists1

What are we left with from happy or dramatic experiences such as love and war? What do we retain from these events? Rememberences which are more or less clear, feelings which are more or less strong, impressions which are more or less blurred, but mainly obscured areas. (Lamia Joreige, ‘Here and Perhaps Elsewhere’) Does anything more than danger stimulate our creativity? And does anything threaten our creativity more than danger? (Nawal El Saadawi, ‘Dissidence and Creativity’) Traditionally, latency is defined as the state of what exists in a non-apparent manner, but which can manifest itself at a given moment. The latent image is the invisible, yet-to-be-developed image on an exposed surface . . . Latency is about affirming a presence. (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, ‘Wonder Beirut’)

In her article ‘Mapping Peace’, Miriam Cooke claims that ‘women have a stake in interpreting their war experiences’ and that she, as literary critic, ‘ha[s] a stake in making sense of these interpretations . . . in a world grown tolerant of violence, we must understand how its assumptions shape our lives’.2 Mindful of the difficulty in maintaining traditional social norms, Cooke argues that ‘differences of perspective and in socio-political roles that are acceptable in normal times become intolerable in war time’.3 Writing during war time is, to Cooke, an experience that is part of war itself, an experience that informs the socio-political roles that precede it. Here I want to look at Hanan AlShaykh’s novels The Story of Zahra and Beirut Blues and Mai Ghoussoub’s Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within as instances of Lebanese women’s war literature where the ‘intolerable’ is written. I would also like to briefly introduce the broad concerns of Arab women’s war literature and the critical context that has come to surround these works. How women experience their political and gendered roles as they understand, negotiate and represent war is of particular interest to me. I also ask whether it is possible to determine the extent to which writers participate in the construction of a new history and how they articulate ambivalence towards their role in it. I argue that although

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much existing criticism of this war literature views writing as the authoritative tool against the violence of war, in other words, as passive resistance, and though I do not want to discount this view, it is also crucial to attempt to understand the stories that are being told as ones that reveal monstrosity, hatred and the unexpected – in other words, stories that attempt to write the transformation that war brings. Events are fictionalised and documented in such a way that they acquire an active role in this negotiation of the consequences of war, and are not just observations, but emerge as critical manifestations of intolerable situations. The texts examined incorporate both writing as resistance and writing of methods of resistance that themselves end up questioning hitherto acknowledged (though not necessarily accepted) gender-specific rules. In other words, though writing about the condition of war may be viewed as an act of resistance in itself by many critics, and indeed many authors, the events we encounter are more intricate and momentous than this, revealing frustration, loathing, violence and even exhilaration. When I read certain novels by Lebanese women authors, it does not occur to me that the writers are participating in an identifiable resistance to the war (which is not to say that they cannot be recuperated as doing so by critics). Rather, I see a fictionalisation, and in many ways an embodiment of a struggle with the norms of gender uncovered through the circumstances of war. The experience of war, though it may initially seek to reaffirm established gender roles, ends up blurring and even annihilating the definiteness of just these roles. War in this instance provides the arena for actions to be detached from their supposedly feminine or masculine matrices and observed differently. It seems to me that what emerges most strongly is a resistance to the idea of war as all-consuming and a strong reaffirmation of the choice to either survive or die through one’s chosen means. Though many have argued that the novels endeavour to promote a narrative for survival (whether implicitly or explicitly), events in the works themselves reveal otherwise.4 These endeavours are undertaken in ways that do not conform with everyday social codes, and events in the texts perform a structuring and restructuring of ways of participating in war. I have chosen to focus on Ghoussoub and Al-Shaykh’s writing, as it refuses to judge the war on moral grounds and avoids collapsing the war into neatly understandable events. It is clear, from the complex set of discords that inaugurated the war in Lebanon, and to which I shall draw attention briefly below, that this task would seem unproductive. Instead, Ghoussoub and Al-Shaykh are involved in writing the experience of war in order to uncover how new sites of experience came about and in reconfiguring the possibilities that became available to women.5 Disparate female characters in these three works become immersed in activities (such as otherwise forbidden military and sexual activity) that become available for exploitation due to the situation of war, where regulatory norms lose some of their centrality. As social structures are temporarily redefined, obligations and responsibilities change and the women find themselves beholden to new laws.6

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War stories In her work Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East, Lebanese author Evelyn Accad claims that ‘nonviolent active struggle is the only viable and hopeful strategy’.7 Ruth Hottell, in her appraisal of Accad’s work, empathises that ‘the douceur apparent in Accad’s work is not passive but active resistance to hate, injustice and oppression’.8 ‘Political action and writing’ are linked, as it is the only way to sustain a ‘nonviolent political activity’.9 In the novels that I will discuss, action within the text can and must be seen as a viable alternative to the activity of writing (hence it is possible to argue for the inclusion of these alternatives). I must concur with Inge Boer’s position where she claims that: ‘I do not subscribe to Accad’s . . . dichotomizing of male public space and war versus female private space and love. If such dichotomies have ever been useful, they have certainly stopped being useful in our times. Yet, this need for dichotomies, boundaries and splits is significant in itself.’10 Indeed, some of the most significant actions taken by the characters are to an extent violent ones and it is important to address these as empowering moments as well, representing a will to violence (rather than treating them as representations of the ills of war). In her discussion of women’s political insurgency, Rajeswari Mohan has suggested that ‘narratives of insurgency press against the limits of theories of feminist agency and highlight the areas remaining to be mapped by feminist navigations between margin and centre’.11 Though I may not be embarking on a comfortable route in the analysis of these texts, it is important to distinguish that, although the activity of writing may be an act of non-violent activism, the events portrayed within the text are oftentimes violent. This cannot diminish their significance; on the contrary, it emphasises the need for an examination of this violence in order to understand how and why these texts challenge traditionally accepted feminine narratives. We must be alert to the possibility that ‘a specifically feminist agency might unfold in the course of the quest for national identity and, more importantly, [demonstrate] the ways in which the idea of nation is transvalued and redefined by women’s participation in nationalist struggles’ (my emphasis).12 In the literature examined, injustice and oppression emerge not just as products of war but, rather, as social phenomena already familiar to women that are re-examined in the literature of war. The religious, political and sexual norms that inform these products are reinterpreted by the women who write. The authors use the space of their work to interrogate how women view themselves as performing certain gender configurations underscored by these norms. This self-assessment is crucial to how women understand or seek to challenge the hatred, injustice and oppression that they feel as women. It becomes possible to ascertain that Lebanese authors see the reality of war as an opportunity to make these sentiments clear. The parameters (though ever changing) of war will be used to explore how, once again, gender expectations are questioned in the disruptive reality that war brings about. Survival becomes a central issue for all the women concerned in the literature of war, but not at any cost. Liana Badr,

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writing of war and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, claims that ‘the only indestructible thing left in life was everybody’s obsessive will to survive’.13 Though I understand this will to life, I did not find this to be the central motif in much of the literature that I read and interpreted. I can see the value of Badr’s statement as a rallying point, but cannot therefore reject other forms of participation that emerge from these texts. For instance, the means and approaches to survival vary immensely. Badr’s analysis underplays the significant diversity of the responses to war inaugurated by war-time society and conditions. Agents struggling to survive (and their different ways if interpreting survival) no longer necessarily take into consideration laws (juridical or familial) that govern peacetime and consequently construct strategies as they come into contact with new experiences (rather than simply react to them). With reference to the early part of the civil war in Lebanon in particular, ‘violence against one-self, one’s country, one’s village or city and one’s street’14 brought with it a renewed sense of obligation towards self-preservation. I have also considered Fadia Faqir’s argument that certain Middle Eastern women writers try to write from a genderless space.15 Though I am tempted by this position, I find it difficult to bypass Butler’s question: ‘what conditions the domain of appearance for gender itself ?’16 To claim a genderless space is to close off the conditions that constitute an understanding of how gender norms are formed, fixed and understood. I have understood Faqir’s statement as marking the sincerity of some Arab women who wish to avoid a feminist labelling (this further complicates the definition and remit of feminism that I discussed in Chapter 1: which feminism? whose feminism, etc.). Faqir’s position creatively allows for a broader critical framework that does not seek to align itself with a specific discourse, though again, I cannot see how this is possible, given the arguments presented earlier on the uneven field of feminism itself. Though Arab writer Fawzia Rashid has argued, self-reflexively, that in writing it did not concern me that the realisation should be feminist in the limited subjective sense, but rather intellectual in the general sense, since in my view women’s issues were always part of local and international social issues and the conflict was not with men so much as with distorted and regressive inherited ideas which controlled both men and women . . . we can no longer simply [be] concerned with what a woman says in her writing, but also with how she says it and how her creative self communicates itself to others.17 This does not seem to be in conflict with declarations around the recognition of gendered experience. Rashid here argues for a way out of these ‘inherited ideas’ that require articulation in order that they can be overcome. These inherited ideas are what constitute the conditions for a gendered experience and are what need to be challenged through a different form of writing. ‘Experience’ and the value given to the expression of experience become a crucial part of the history of war. Miriam Cooke, in Women and the War Story, is interested in ‘those

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moments of women’s empowerment, though they seem to be invisible’.18 Though invisible moments must also be given their due, empowerment is also located in militant and regressive actions located within the writing. Often, these are actions that cannot be explained away as unfortunate consequences of the war but must be viewed as choices made in the struggle for survival, death and recognition. Whereas Cooke’s admirable aim is to situate women in the war story and to highlight their gender roles through this very writing, events represented by the authors that force us to question what we think the war experience is, are equally significant. The war story need not only be studied in order that we learn how the ordinary becomes extraordinary (i.e. the domestic/ private sphere) but also how women experiment with the structures and loosen strings that bind conventional gender norms together. Women who write their own war story, Cooke argues, ‘object to the way in which men have generally overlooked their involvement, whether active or passive. Their writings show how women wage peace, in other words, how women fight for justice without necessarily engaging in destruction’.19 Nevertheless, the female characters in AlShaykh and Ghoussoub’s work make use of war to understand or explore certain gender-related issues and redefine themselves through engaging in destruction too. Though many women may reject the principles underlying the rationale for war, they admit to the energetic aura of war that allows for the influx of new experiences and a reassessment of old lives.20 In the case of Lebanon and women’s writing surrounding the Lebanese war, the failure of a coherent nationalism would seem to attract even less coherence in the writing produced (though war writing in general seems to open up questions of nationalist solidarity).21 I also want to move away from the idea that writing about war in and of itself indicates a form of bravery. Cooke makes a plea for this position: women who choose to write about wars they have lived are defying an ageold silencing code. Their speaking about now and in knowledge of their transgressions allows us to read back into the gaps and silences of the War Story. Their stories threaten the privilege assumed proper to the right to tell the War Story. As the right to tell diffuses among all who may claim to have had a war experience, however unrecognisable as such by the standard conventions, the masculine contract between violence, sexuality, and glory comes undone.22 Whilst it might be uneasy, we also need to look at the spaces where women experience the link between ‘violence, sexuality, and glory’, thus revealing it to be not only a ‘masculine contract’ but a connection women also experience, a connection that tells us much about the norms of gender and the way roles are imagined and enacted in times of struggle.23 By placing war at the centre of an analysis of gender we can begin to question the myth of gender. This chapter investigates how war creates an alternative yet parallel struggle within the consciousnesses of women who participate in and reflect on the events generated by war.

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How to write war?24 Carol Fadda-Conrey writes that, with reference to the Lebanese war: Registering the Lebanese war experience, however, is varied, differing in its focus and scope depending on the specific historical moment that is being recorded, due to this war’s multiple circumstances and settings. Moreover, the needs instigating writers to tackle the topic of the Lebanese war also vary, and often concomitantly exist with a quest to foment a form of Lebanese identity, whether a personal or collective one, regardless of the writer’s nationality.25 Registering an anxiety felt by Arab women writers, of having to express a Lebanese identity, seems more restrictive than liberating. Al-Shaykh and Ghoussoub’s writing also reveals the need to consider not only what constitutes them as Lebanese but how the war redefines their gendered position within this society. Though I sympathise with Fadda-Conrey’s overall compulsion to view these novels as reflections on loss by writers now living in exile, where the aim is to ‘reconstruct, and deconstruct, the Lebanese war by turning their scrutinizing gaze upon it’, the novels also go some way towards constructing the meaning and genesis of the war itself. I am not at all certain that the novels achieve critical distance, as the circumstances and developments that we witness all reveal a profound involvement with all aspects of the conflict, and though FaddaConrey looks to the novels for ways in which they ‘became transgressive acts simultaneously inscribing and questioning the morality of war’s events’, this points to a conciliatory gesture that the novels do not always participate in.26 Amal Amireh, in her illuminating article on Etel Adnan’s novel Sitt Marie Rose, concludes that Sitt Marie Rose’s lack of closure, its self-consciousness about the political nature of all representation, and its employment of multiple points of view do not paralyze it with postmodern ambivalence or trap it within facile pluralism. Although the novel may not endorse any of the explanations given of the war, its stand against all forms of violence – territorial, ecological, physical and epistemic – is unambiguous. So is the political and ethical vision at the core of Marie-Rose’s life and martyrdom, a vision that challenges gender, class, religious and national hierarchies.27 Certainly, some novels on the subject of the Lebanese war offer varying alternatives and reactions. Amireh’s revisiting of Sitt Marie Rose is part of a wider reassessment of many war writers identified in Miriam Cooke’s War’s Other Voices. Though ambiguity does not inform many of the writers’ stances against the war, it does seem to form part of the perspective provided by Al-Shaykh and Ghoussoub. In Al-Shaykh, ‘nothing, even the land, not even memory, is sacred. All is subject to review, to exposure.’28 Mona Fayad argues that ‘an awareness of

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the function of writing’ is very important in the building of an ‘imagined community’, a term that she borrows from Anderson and subsequently Bhabha in her discussion of history as a ‘performative’ rather than a ‘pedagogical’ act.29 This is a very mobilising view, as it suggests that we can look to the narratives of war to understand diversity in experiences rather than simply extract moral or ethical lessons. The notion of history as performative, as constituting a discourse that we need not take at face value and that we can question is a significant one. Nevertheless, critics of Arab women writers have often expected more from their subjects of study than they have been able to provide.30 Too often, the choice writers make between a nationalist or a feminist focus becomes a point of debate. Rajeswari Mohan’s article on the Palestinian activist Leila Khaled argues that there is room to discuss feminist agency, even in the seemingly nonfeminine space of active militant resistance (the most nationalist of actions, one might argue).31 In a discussion of Khaled’s autobiography, My People Shall Live, Mohan argues how: patriotism [in the writing] increasingly becomes invested with libidinal energy as Palestine gets figured as an estranged love, as the promise of wholeness, as the only way towards the restoration of her humanity, as the precious reward for her pain and suffering, and thereby as the object of her yearnings. (p. 73, my emphasis) Mohan’s subject, Leila Khaled has been consistently active in ‘representing women’s issues to the PLO’ and in her lifetime had ‘attempted two hijackings’ (p. 54). Mohan argues that academic feminism does not allow for the type of performances staged by Khaled. In fact: this ambiguous and unpredictable deployment of femininity is greeted with scepticism if not outright dismissal in some quarters of feminism. For instance, women’s militancy has provoked strong critique from Robin Morgan who agrees with many political scientists that terrorism is a strategic response to abjection, to being so thoroughly marginalized as to be deprived of conventional modes of redress.32 (p. 70) Like Mohan, I argue that we must allow for such performances, which is not to say that we ethically advocate them. To be silent on the choices that women under particular conditions and in particular contexts make would be tantamount to adhering to the most conventional ideas of female passivity. We must try and understand how certain choices are made, under what circumstances they are made and what ideologies are revealed in the process. Rejecting uncomfortable positions, or explaining them away as instances of the triumph of patriarchy, seems to me to be a regressive move. Mohan’s strategy is to attempt, using the context and theoretical tools available to her, to understand Palestinian

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militant Leila Khaled’s advocacy of violence in the struggle for national emancipation. Mohan notes that narratives such as Khaled’s are important for feminist discourses precisely because they offer concrete instances of the contestatory relations between feminisms in a world order driven in its most minute forms by hierarchies of wealth and political influence, and demonstrate what exactly it means, in terms of available political options and strategies, to be the ubiquitous subject of feminism. (p. 71) Mohan’s argument is crucial here, as it highlights the significance of differing contexts that require attention in order that they be understood as valuable rather than emasculating. Her position is also similar to that of Martha Nussbaum who, while appreciating Butler’s notions of mobilising bodily acts, fears that these acts may not be political enough if they remain within the confines of the single experiencing subject. The example of Khaled, for Mohan, illustrates the potential in political actions: Leila Khaled’s case [demonstrates] that while Butler’s theoretical interventions make visible the subtle far-reaching effects of women’s political actions, the linkages between women’s positioning as sexual subjects and the other locations of their subjectivity and agency need to be mapped in detail if we are to appreciate the full range of political effectivity of subversive bodily acts. (p. 78) In short, rebellious bodily acts and their representation in fiction need to be studied in context. 33 Suzanne Cotter, writing in her essay Beirut Unbound of the photographer Jalal Toufic’s book Forthcoming, claims that: Toufic imagined a situation in which a Lebanese photographer working in Beirut during the civil war ‘had become used to viewing things at the speed of war’ to the extent that he could not readjust to viewing things ‘at the rhythm of peace.’ When he returned to photography several years later, the photographer found that, when outside of Lebanon, he could once again take classically composed photographs. However, when he tried to photograph in Lebanon again, he was suffering from what Toufic describes as ‘a withdrawal of tradition’: his photographs ‘still looked like they were taken by a photographer lacking time to aim . . . compositions haphazard and focus almost always off ’.34 This observation concerning time, rhythm and focus points to a particular way of looking back at events that is ‘almost always off ’. This lack of focus is perhaps

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symbolic of the narratives of the war that seem unwilling and unable to discuss clearly the nature of the struggle, as it necessitates a questioning of how to define Lebanon and consequently, how to define who or what was Lebanese. Though it is possible to expostulate at length on what determined the war in Lebanon from 1975 to 1991, I prefer here to offer some broadly agreed-upon conditions of the political and geographical make-up of Lebanon leading up to the period 1975/6. The socio-political landscape preceding 1975 consisted of what could be termed several distinct but connected problems or situations, not least of which was Lebanon’s multi-confessional, multi-ethnic configuration. Among these was the expulsion of Palestinians, during the 1948 and 1967 Arab–Israeli wars, who later thought they had found a home, as refugees, in Lebanon. The setting up of the PLO and its struggle against Israel on the southern Lebanese border exacerbated the tensions between the Lebanese and the Israelis, leading to the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Furthermore, local problems related to confessionalism and the political weight of minorities, namely the Christian Maronites, led to struggles over how Lebanon identified itself. Lebanon was broadly known to have been the only developed democracy in the Arab world; external forces nevertheless co-joined to split it along various fault-lines, leading to community affiliations between the Muslim communities and the Palestinian cause, and the Christian communities objecting to the Palestinian cause being fought on Lebanese land. Lamia Rustum Shehadeh has usefully conceptualised the situation in Lebanon as four-faceted: ‘Syria’s quest for hegemony, the Palestinian phenomenon, Israeli concerns, and the continuing domestic conflict’. What is compelling in terms of Beirut geography is that ‘by the end of the 1975–76 war Beirut was partitioned into East (mainly Christian) and West (mainly Muslim and the PRM [Palestinian Resistance Movement]), symbolizing the schism and divisiveness that came to afflict Lebanese society for another fifteen years’.35 In his work on the well-known Lebanese artist Fairuz and the Rahbani brothers, Christopher Stone argues for the family’s integral cultural role in the imagining of the nation through the Ba’albakk festivals; an imagining that posited an ideal Lebanon (located in the ‘idealised and nostalgic versions of the Christian village of Mount Lebanon’36) that did not speak to the diversity of the Lebanese and thereby highlighted the divisions always already in waiting.37 Stone maintains that the predominant cultural vision of Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s was a narrative that ‘excluded the growing majority of non-Christian Lebanese who hailed primarily from areas other than Mount Lebanon . . . a narrative that did not involve at least half of the country’s population’, made up of Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Protestant, Shi’ite, Sunni and Druze among others, all with particular ethnic and cultural affiliations, not to mention the south of Lebanon that corresponded very little to this cultural vision.38 That such divisions were already present and propagated through and within cultural production is no surprise. The works of fiction that deal with the Lebanese war reflect the war’s predictable diverse political and social pluralistic components. The literature that I look at is keen to view these diverse ideas about Lebanon and women’s role within it.

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Hanan Al-Shaykh: what’s love got to do with it? The Story of Zahra has received much critical attention. Critics who have discussed Al-Shaykh’s novel The Story of Zahra engage with aspects of the main protagonist Zahra’s personality that are emphasised by the war and the extent to which she manipulates or makes use of the situation of war. The novel tells the story of Zahra, a woman in her thirties whose life vacillates between day-today experiences and memories. A series of failed relationships and a miserable family environment that includes a demanding father and a self-centred mother constitute her experience of love and relationships. Her affair with a married man in Beirut and her ultimate marriage to a man whom she neither loves nor chooses define her inability to fulfil some unknown desire that she seeks. The outbreak of the war sees her back in Beirut (after a sojourn in Africa), where she begins a sexual affair with a sniper. This relationship seems to offer her the possibility of a fulfilling encounter. It is, however, cut short by an unintended pregnancy. The sniper kills her (or so we assume) and Zahra dies questioning his reasons. In his introduction to The Pyschoanalysis of Race, Christopher Lane problematises the ethical dimensions of war and the scholarship surrounding war. He emphasises that: Studies that aim to resolve urban strife and ethnic warfare . . . anticipate that people locked in conflict want an end to struggle in order to secure the material gains they can achieve only in times of peace. To this perspective, psychoanalysis adds a difficult truth: when people and groups are locked in conflict, they are – beyond their immediate interest in securing sovereignty over another land or people – already experiencing intangible gains. This argument appraises both conventional perspectives on war and prevailing assumptions about what it means to be at peace.39 Intangible gains of war can be, in this case, unspeakable gains. It seems controversial to admit that Zahra may be experiencing gains in times of conflict, however, the ‘difficult truth’ that Lane refers to is exactly the kind of psychological gain that is difficult to accept or include in a reconciliatory discourse. There is no painless way to admit that Zahra, as well as the female protagonists of Beirut Blues and Ghoussoub’s Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within, do in fact experience gains in the time of ‘strife’ and ‘warfare’, death and destruction. However, these ‘intangible gains’ become a little more understandable (though it may be difficult for some to ever accept these gains) if we are genuinely sensitive to the particular context within which they are gained. Cooke admits that ‘the climax of Zahra’s healing through her absorption into the normless chaos comes in her sexual relationship with the sniper’, though in the same move, undermines Zahra’s agency. She completes her argument on Zahra thus: ‘Timid, self-conscious Zahra decides that she will do her bit for humanity: she will offer her abused body to the local sniper, the quintessential

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symbol of abstracted violence, to distract him from his deadly job.’40 In turn, Accad provides us with a hopeless diagnosis of Zahra’s condition when she writes that it seems as though in Zahra’s mind the only way to have any kind of control over the elements of death ravaging her country is to become part of this violence through sexuality . . . deeply wounded in her past by her family and a society that does not allow its individuals, let alone its women, to fulfil themselves, Zahra’s ‘solution’ is to sink even more deeply into sickness and destruction, while thinking she has become ‘normal and human.’ . . . sex becomes a drug . . . [Zahra] is afraid of it, yet it puts her in a trance that blinds her to everything else.41 Zahra’s actual words in the text tell a different story: What was I here for? Before I came, he would have been picking out his victims’ heads as targets, and after I left would be doing the same. Why, every day, did I sneak down that street of death and war and arrive at his place? Could I say I had been able to save anyone, even in those moments when we met and had intercourse? But I couldn’t even consider these to hold a reprieve from death for anyone. My visits only replaced his siestas. (My emphasis)42 Accad condemns this sexual encounter as one that does not incorporate love and therefore lacks equal sexual understanding and fulfilment; she in turn does not allow Zahra to ‘fulfil [herself]’. Sabah Ghandour, in her article ‘Hanan AlShaykh’s Hikayat Zahra: A Counter-Narrative and a Counter-History’, places Zahra’s experience squarely within the confines of a nationalist framework.43 ‘In Zahra’, Ghandour writes, ‘we lack the historical truth traditionally implied by the narrator’s seemingly neutral voice. Rather, we find another kind of ‘‘truth’’ being produced – a truth related to personal, political, or socioeconomic history.’44 Ghandour burdens the text with a duty and a responsibility that it cannot be beholden to. Equating the female protagonist to the condition of Lebanon reduces the text to a gendered reflection of a divided nation: While we are reading a personal (hi)story of Zahra, the story of her being used and abused, we are reading Zahra’s story, at the same time, as a metaphor of Lebanon, a country that has been used and abused by its own people. In a sense, Zahra’s body, which is private and personal, cannot be separated from its function as public and communal.45 Though this reading accords Zahra’s actions with scope beyond the personal, it also diverts attention from Zahra’s journey to self-discovery as a result of the chaos that surrounds her. Zahra pursues relationships according to what her experience has taught her and while this tends to result in self-destructive behaviour, the spatial freedom accorded to her at the time that she meets the

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sniper (she is left alone in the family apartment for a few months) and the ongoing war ‘outside’ allows her to reorganise the pattern of these experiences. It is very difficult to read the book on an allegorical level – one would have to accept a precarious premise that a ‘Lebanon’ exists outside of its inhabitants’ construction, just as we would have to accept that there is a ‘true’ Zahra outside of her abusive relationships. The book goes to some lengths to show how she is constituted and produced through these experiences. For example, altering her ideas about sex teaches Zahra that what has been lacking in her previous sexual encounters is the space to learn about her body and experience its possibilities. Though both Accad and Cooke reiterate Zahra’s supposed ulterior motive (distracting the sniper from his victims), I have read Zahra’s actions to be more narcissistic (and thereby difficult to parallel with a wider nationalist agenda). In fact, a closer examination of the passage cited above reveals that Zahra dismisses the desire to excuse herself in terms of altruism: ‘my visits only replaced his siestas’. Nowhere in the novel is there an example of selfless behaviour; in fact, Zahra seems generally unable to care for anyone but herself.46 Al-Shaykh seems, quite unapologetically (as she also does in Beirut Blues), to reveal narcissistic forces at work, operating within the situation of war. That Zahra’s move towards the sniper should be an act of goodwill towards the suffering multitude and stand in for a crumbling Lebanon seems unlikely. Submission to this argument seeks to place Zahra’s sexuality at the service of the war and a greater nationalist agenda rather than allowing for the situation of war as that which allows her selfexpression. If we accept at this point that the ‘intangible gains’ of war are desire and pleasure (by implication these gains are in antithesis to what one would expect from an analysis of war), then we must accept that there may be no place to read the history of Lebanon and its war within her actions. Instead, personal energy and renewal seem to empower Zahra. Aware of the existence of a sniper whom everyone fears, Zahra sets out and carefully plans to meet him. Moments before their encounter, she feels as though she has started to come alive again and the anticipation of the meeting fills her with an energy she cannot ignore: ‘As I mounted the stairs, life slowly flowed back into me . . . was it a normal thing that I was doing, closing all doors of escape behind me?’ (p. 126, my emphasis). Life, action, and energy which are all out there and constitute the war, fill her with desire. Returning home after the encounter, Zahra’s relief is palpable: As I arrived at the entrance to our block, I breathed a sigh of relief, ran up the stairs and opened the door, as relaxed as if I had just heard the war had ended. The apartment was empty. A thread of happiness ran through me. I took off my clothes in the bathroom, then washed and dried myself, thinking of my father and mother and how their absence had made things easier. (p. 128) Likening her experience to a ‘war that has just ended’ suggests that some other conflict has just ended for Zahra, a conflict that is as destructive as any war. Her behaviour seems to invoke a negotiation between two types of masochisms; one

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that enforces her melancholic behaviour and one that enables her to receive and experience pleasure (her death, I can only conclude, acts as a symbol of the impossibility of this pleasure to continue, a kind of ‘axing’ of desire and its fulfilment). Since the language and presumptions of masochism are embedded in the discourse of the death drive, I will refer to this here briefly, but will come back to it in more detail in the analysis of the next two novels. Masochism, as discussed by Freud, seems to be embedded in a death instinct/ drive that is directed towards the self, a pain that is felt to be necessary in order to achieve any type of pleasure (described by Krafft-Ebing in Pontalis and Laplanche’s The Language of Psychoanalysis as a ‘pathological outgrowth of feminine psychological elements’, thus, a trait or condition that feminises him/her who develops it).47 However, Bruce Fink, in his work A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, elaborates on this explanation. Fink argues that though it may appear that the masochist devotes himself to giving his partner jouissance . . . while asking for nothing in return – in other words, that he sacrifices himself by becoming the instrument of the Other’s jouissance, obtaining no enjoyment for himself – Lacan suggests that this is but a cover: the masochist’s fantasy dissimulates the true aim of his actions.48 Zahra’s visits to the sniper symbolise her ability to be free from regulatory norms that otherwise restrict her movements (as mentioned by Evelyn Accad). Fink goes on to explain that in order for the masochistic encounter to come into being the masochist needs to push the partner into ‘declaring limits, into expressing his will that things be one way and not another, that things go no further’.49 ‘I felt no pleasure,’ Zahra says (though she later does), and yet she continues to visit the sniper for no other apparent reason than the fulfilment of his pleasure. However, she declares herself happy. Zahra seems drawn to the limits of the sniper; he cannot talk to her or tell her his real name, yet in turn she need not reveal her identity to him. His apparent advantage over her (sexual pleasure) is weakened in the light of the satisfaction she gains from their involvement. Her masochism, as described by Accad, is engineered in order that she may create the space for her sexual encounters. Zahra’s experience informs her that ‘giving herself ’ is the way to understand sexual love and this is the way that she views her connection to the sniper. However, since she gives herself over to a man of her own choice whilst risking her life at the same time, this dangerous act is unique in that she is its initiator. As she begins to find their encounters pleasurable she considers the direct benefits of the war: the war, which makes one expect the worst at any moment, has led me into accepting this new element in my life. Let it happen, let us witness it, let us open ourselves to accept the unknown, no matter what it may bring, disasters or surprises. The war has been essential. It has swept away the hollowness concealed by routines. It has made me ever more alive, ever more tranquil. (p. 138, my emphases)

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Zahra does not appear to be a self-sacrificing masochist. Rather, I think the necessity of an exchange (she pretends initially to be experiencing pleasure in order for the sniper to continue to want to see her) underscores an agency even in this troubled scene. The masochist ‘never become[s] someone with symbolic status who can see himself as valued for social, cultural, or other symbolically designated achievements’, yet in the moments of exchange there is a desire and a jouissance achieved that give the masochist a role.50 Zahra is able to achieve something outside of the social and cultural by investing a libidinal energy into what seems the masochistic tendency towards death. She is thus able to understand and experience herself as a woman who can desire and receive pleasure, a feature unknown to her and impossible outside of the war situation. In other words, Zahra’s pleasurable encounters allow her to finally realise the ‘routine’ that she has lived so far. The moment of sexual pleasure for Zahra reconfigures her entire sexual/gendered life. Her decision to involve herself in a dangerous and life threatening affair without the guarantee of pleasure or desire is magnanimous in its possibilities. When she does achieve both desire and pleasure these moments pedagogically inform and transform her life. Zahra seems to move into a state of narcissistic masochism. Knowledge of the danger she is involved in only heightens the pleasure that she seeks and this makes her actively happier. Fear of male violence is transformed into a will to take risks. This idea of a narcissistic masochism will be elaborated on in a discussion of AlShaykh’s novel Beirut Blues.

Survival or bust: Al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues and Ghoussoub’s Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within War questions everyday imperatives such as justice, love, life and death in new and unexpected ways. In Al-Shaykh’s 1992 novel Beirut Blues, the protagonist Asmahan remains ‘absorbed with the trivia of love and sex’ while bombs pour down on Beirut and her home.51 What becomes increasingly obvious in this war fiction is that one cannot always care about the war and, by extension, one gets used to the strangeness. ‘How can I answer your questions about the state of the country, when my chief worry is the rat occupying our kitchen?’ Asmahan writes (p. 3). Beirut Blues is made up of a series of letters that Asmahan addresses to the war, an exiled friend, a beloved, Beirut, and even Billie Holiday, whose melancholy singing voice expresses her emotions (hence the English title Blues).52 These unsent/unreceived letters chronicle a life that cannot be fully contained by the events of the war and are not answerable to the dynamics of the war as perceived by others who are not immediately affected. Asmahan remains satisfied with the fact that she remains loyal to trivia: ‘although I’ve stayed in Lebanon I’ve still got some taste. I know what’s going on in the outside world. I’m not standing still, and they haven’t got me wearing a veil yet’ (p. 5). Asmahan’s attitudes underscore the individual’s experience of the war that cannot always be involved in the loftier discourses of justice, freedom and political mobilisation generally associated with war. As Asmahan tries to deal with an

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absurd situation that has divided Beirut into East and West, she finds it equally difficult to conceive of herself as belonging to one or the other on the basis of an arbitrary religious, Muslim/Christian divide.53 Asmahan voices these concerns as she considers an affair with a young man she has met at a wedding party: I can’t open my heart to you. Just for one night? It’s not because you’re a Christian but because tomorrow we’ll be separated, and you won’t be in a hurry to visit the western sector. Perhaps you’ve convinced yourself that I’m from here, because you’ve been drinking and I’m a friend of Hayat’s and probably, like me and Hayat, you don’t think of yourself as being from the east or the west . . . [others have] taken sides. The time may come when I do the same! Who knows? Perhaps then I’ll be happy. Belonging to the same faction, however extreme or outlandish, might be preferable to this . . . where I come from they hate everyone from your sector, even the men at the checkpoint. But I always want to have a chat with them, make them laugh and flirt with me. I seem to need reassurance and affection from your people. I want things to be like they were years ago. (p. 9, my emphasis) Asmahan’s flirting normalises or eases the primacy of the war-torn city. Manganaro, discussing the same scene, astutely notes that Asmahan’s ‘self-portrait is highly ironic, humorous and self-involved. And it is defiantly so.’54 The unwillingness to constantly engage in matters of religious and political affiliation becomes yet another preoccupation that encourages self-involvement. People become afraid to cross political and religious barriers, though sexual barriers now seem weaker. As the war (and the story) progress, love and passion become a reason for Asmahan to risk her life; love and passion displace concerns over the war and become entwined with the threats from the war. Mai Ghoussoub’s Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within is made up of letters and snapshots that consist of memories, letters, historical information, television broadcasts and news headlines.55 This allows for an embeddedness in a variety of reconstructions and discourses. Ghoussoub’s work also displays similar themes to Beirut Blues; namely, that war acts as a catalyst for the emergence of other themes. Both Ghoussoub and Al-Shaykh’s female protagonists have sexual relations, as they describe them, to escape (understand, experience) the numbing process that is war. Risk (as with Zahra) adds a certain thrill that enhances (or replaces) the fear that they already feel for their lives. In Beirut Blues, Asmahan describes her risky meeting with her lover Simon: I was queen of the road and I nudged and pushed and kept my hand on the horn until I reached Simon’s building. The trembling in me surged ahead of me as I ran to find him. I was happy. My meetings with Simon gave me a feeling of warmth and excitement, snatching me right out of the city as it surged back and forth between uproar and fragrant calm. For Simon was

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Love seems irrelevant, as it is the excitement and thrill of reaching the object of desire that supplants the constant preoccupation with the war. In her article ‘Balconies onto Beirut’, Nour Dados’s assertion that ‘the connection between geography and fear in Beirut appears to be a product of the civil war’ reminds me of the joy described by those snatching a few moments between the shelling in order to get somewhere, anywhere.56 Feeling like a ‘queen’, these meetings with her lover ‘snatc[h] [her] right out of the city’ of war and ensure a complete involvement elsewhere. Likewise, in Leaving Beirut the protagonist remembers a dangerous affair: ‘this was the beginning of a passion that was immersed in war and danger, fired by its secrecy and its proximity to death and destruction. She had plunged into an adventure of perilous abnormality, knowing its dangers but doing nothing to resist them’ (p. 14). Fear seems to be replaced by a frenzy that masks or echoes events outside: I used him to belong. To harvest energy from the fear of death that was spreading around. I suppressed the fear in my body beneath the warmth of his embrace . . . I gladly repressed questions about the meaning of what was happening, about its contradiction with the ideals we had all started from. I kept moving and doing things instead of stopping and questioning. I lost any sense of normality and called on his body to take me deeper into the dizziness of the unknown. (p. 15) Although the physical existence of the war is acknowledged, its effect is debilitated by the sexual encounters. It is apparent that the sexual encounter does not offer a full and total means of repression from the war, but it does offer a distraction from its pitiless destructiveness. Nevertheless, when the protagonist’s brother is wounded as a direct result of his involvement in the war, this war’s reality becomes too immediate. When her lover comes to the hospital the narrator is devastated: You should not have come into those corridors, into the reality of my family. You should not have become real. We could only belong in abnormality; we were only real inside an actuality that was aberrant; we made love frantically and grew more passionate only because of it. (p. 18, my emphasis)

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The configuration of what is real and what is not can only be understood in terms of how the individual experience is perceived. As Asmahan in Beirut Blues is frantically trying to reach her lover, she is caught in a shelling episode; as the narrator in Leaving Beirut experiences a consequence of war, her brother’s injury, she ceases to realise that her experience is also a consequence of war. Both women do not experience a love that is emotional as well as sexual. The war and the sexual experience are both too immediate and pervasive as well as physically invasive to be understood critically, while one is actively involved. It is only after getting dressed that Asmahan realises that she does not love Simon. It is only after her brother is wounded that Ghoussoub’s protagonist is struck with the futility of her sexual relationship. Nevertheless, the experiences themselves are worth examining for the energy that they reflect. This energy that provokes risking death for pleasure and fulfilment could either be interpreted as self-destructive or as a liberating move. I will elaborate on the ideas prowling behind this energy or, as we shall call it, drive, to try and understand this paradox. Laplanche has been very useful to me here in clarifying some of the complexities that Freud encountered in explaining the energy behind the death drive. Laplanche himself goes on to elaborate a theory that would seem to bring the death drive in line with the sex drive (as opposed to Eros/the love drive), thus giving the death drive a libido that it lacks in Freudian psychoanalysis. I hope to show that the situation of war constitutes, for Asmahan and the protagonist of the particular section entitled ‘A Kind of Madness’ in Leaving Beirut, a possibility of a female life drive understood as sexuality fuelled by the immanence of death. This can help explain why the heroines experience no love and yet continue to engage in sexual fulfilment in situations of great danger. In Life and Death in Psychoanalysis Jean Laplanche elaborates on the possibility of uniting the sex drive with the death drive, thus providing the death drive with an energy or compulsion that it does not have in Freudian psychoanalysis (symbolised as it is by inertia).57 Laplanche situates sexuality as different to Eros yet as part of the same economy as the death drive. Since Freud does not admit to the death drive as having any energy or pressure of its own (though he does claim in Civilisation and Its Discontents that the death instinct ‘eludes our perception . . . unless it is tinged with eroticism’) Laplanche concludes that it must derive this energy from somewhere.58 He argues that the death drive must therefore get its energy from the ‘energy of the sexual drive’, the ‘libido’ (p. 124). Eros, something totally different to sexuality, seeks to maintain pressure, and even augment the cohesion and the synthetic tendency of living beings and of psychical life. Whereas, ever since the beginnings of psychoanalysis, sexuality was in its essence hostile to binding – a principle of un-binding or unfettering (Entbindung) which could be bound only through the intervention of the ego – what appears with Eros is the bound and binding form of sexuality brought to light by the discovery of narcissism. (p. 124, my emphasis)

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Laplanche seems to posit Eros as something completely at odds with the idea of sexuality. Eros here seems to be some type of love that is not immediately connected to the body, an ideal that is constrained by ideas of ‘binding’. In this way, Laplanche is free to conceive of sexuality as that which has no responsibility because it embodies a ‘free energy’. Sexuality thus becomes a pleasure-seeking drive that, in its reluctance to take responsibility, in its unboundness, becomes associated with the energy of the death drive. The war gives the women the space within which to experience this unbinding, responsibility-free pleasure, though it may be tied up with the experience of death. The unpredictability of war gives sexual pleasure little meaning and function outside of its role as a source of pleasure and a temporary yet instructive distraction from the war. Thus, in serving no social function, in failing to bind persons to each other, sex becomes linked with a narcissistic death drive kept alive through libidinal energy. This involvement with the death drive invokes a risk of total destruction and distraction. However, within the confines of a masochistic narcissism, it seems to be the primary aim and one that brings with it some type of relief. For these women, these sexual experiences are crucial, as through them they understand the futility of war and at the same time their capacity to pursue and obtain fulfilment as a result of war. When Asmahan gives in to a short night of passion, her friend Hayat, who has left Beirut but is back on a visit, claims that what Asmahan has done is not ‘normal’ and suggests that she see a therapist. Asmahan does not argue, but reminds herself that those who are not around cannot understand and criticise unknowingly. When Hayat leaves, Asmahan is relieved; she can go back to her ‘daily routine’ (p. 14). Pursuing a sensual impulse provides a relief to the threatening situations and simultaneously allows her to experience the threat that is war. Whereas her upbringing would have disallowed such a sensualist release, here, the excitement of sex replaces or conflates with the terror of war. She vacillates between regulation and non-regulation. What we have here is a feminine appropriation of the death drive that would seem to give it a new meaning outside of war by investing it with libidinal energy. This complicates the issue further, as we now need to address whether this remains a death drive as such. What is significant is that this touching upon the death drive possibly rekindles the will to live. Ultimately, what acts as a constant opposition to this sensualist release is the constant reminder by others of the pain and suffering that they ought to be experiencing as part of the war. This contrasts well with what the women experience in their lives and how they understand and manipulate the war situation. Both Al-Shaykh and Ghoussoub refer to this ‘concerned outsider’ or Westerner to somehow revalidate their personal experience vis-a`-vis the experience that they are supposed to be having.59

Concerned outsiders: what do they care? The concerned Westerner or outsider appears as a contrast to how the protagonists view and understand their role as participating in war. Ghoussoub’s

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narrator tackles the figure of a Danish woman who has married a friend of hers and lives with him in Copenhagen. Al-Shaykh’s outsider is divided into three different personalities. One is her Lebanese lover who has come back to collect material for his books. Another is a woman who provides unwanted sympathy when Asmahan is abroad. The third is Asmahan’s friend Hayat, who has gone to live in Belgium with her children. All these four figures remain unaware of their frustrating actions and phrases, their unwanted words that both categorise and humiliate. These figures demonstrate a belief in structures of justice and an ethics that has now collapsed for the protagonists. A gap is created between them and us, fuelled by ideological discourses of what is right and wrong, and who and what serves justice. Asmahan describes a scene away from Beirut, visiting friends, that illustrates this problem: Minutes later a woman called Vera came in and asked which of us had just arrived from Beirut. I collapsed on to my seat. Beirut came back to haunt me, paralysing my hands as I tried to eat, making me forget how relaxed I’d been here, in a country which still existed, and was free from the chaos of warfare. I was used to the idea that there were places where people led normal lives and, although the reality made me uncertain and jealous, it had helped me forget what I’d seen and heard in the times of violence and siege . . . I retreated into silence, waiting for their questions. They weren’t questions, but statements. The emotion in them was genuine but they were in a hurry to let the trivia take over the evening again. (p. 33) Likewise, Ghoussoub’s narrator of Leaving Beirut depicts an over-concerned European, Kirsten. Remembering a previous trip to Copenhagen to attend her friend Hashem’s funeral, she describes meeting his Danish wife: ‘He ended up in Denmark and there he settled and quickly fell in love with the very good Kirsten’ (p. 85). However, Kirsten is ‘too good’, and had even ‘proclaimed her willingness to wear the veil if they ever went back to live in his country’ (p. 86). This relationship plays on various tropes that the narrator reflects on as she reads Hashem’s old letters that tell her of the angel that he has found: he was teasing me about his luck in having found her. Hashem had never really accepted what he described as my ‘inauthentic’ feminism. He used to say that I’d been influenced by the Western values that had invaded my city and my group of friends. The more I read his catalogue of praise for Kirsten, the more I realised how much Hashem was missing his country, and also how much Kirsten idealised the ‘Third World’. She obviously loved the Third World and it seemed that Hashem was her way of gaining herself access to it . . . the truth was that I was fed up with the sweet smiles that appeared on the faces of good hearted Western liberals and leftists when they found out where you’d come from, and ‘what you must have gone through’. I found myself always wanting to tell them about the fun we

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What angers the narrator in Leaving Beirut and Asmahan in Beirut Blues is that those experiencing the war are perceived as one-dimensional and idealised, victims and sufferers. I cannot be sure of this ambivalence in other war-ridden societies, but what seems to emerge from this particular conflict is this need to dis-identify and to no longer be either idealised or pitied. Imprisoning discourses of pity only serve to reinstate the boundaries already in place through the very materiality of war; checkpoints, green lines, curfews.60 In fact, a presumed common war experience serves to actively diminish the individual experience of the trauma of war and distinctive coping facilities and norms. What these two novels show is how war creates another reality, one that does not idealise selfpity and that in fact enables its survivors to experience and forge parallel experiences. Likewise, Asmahan’s lover Jawad, who lives in France and writes books about Lebanon, visits Asmahan’s village in the south of Lebanon and bemoans the destruction of the land that has been given over to the growing of hashish and poppies, no longer the agricultural haven it once was: ‘Look what they’re doing to these plains. See how everything’s calm and still on the surface, but underneath it’s seething with intrigues, drugs and party politics’ (p. 165). As Manganaro describes, ‘Jawad’s remarks capture a generally outspoken and insidious consequence of Lebanon’s wars: the capitalization on the tragedy by outsiders.’61 Asmahan’s response is violent and unleashes the complex reactions to these romantic notions of the village that are expected to house the components of a lost and idealised place: You carry on and I listen, but remain unmoved by your lecture about drugs and corruption. You’ve arrived late with your theories. There’s nothing wrong with a little enthusiasm here and there, because you will soon forget and leave our reality behind for the European way of life. Your diary is crowded with appointments: publishers, magazines, dinner invitations, parties, broadcasts; all of them written in your neat, clear hand. You prescribe laws as if you were in a normal country with citizens who still glory in that title and all it stands for. It’s easy for you to propound these views, when you haven’t hidden in a shelter, had friends and neighbours killed in bread queues, returned home to your apartment block and found it has vanished, and realised after a moment that the rubble under your feet is all that remains of it. (p. 165) Jawad’s expectations and preoccupations are too far removed from the reality of those persons living the war. His view of Lebanon cannot be but a folkloric and ideal one.62 As Manganaro perceptively notes, Al-Shaykh ‘intentionally

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demystifies Lebanon.’ For her, Al-Shaykh’s ‘Lebanon is disturbing and fluid’, reflecting her refusal to mythologise or ‘preserv[e] a distorted national memory or identity’.63 By reminding us that all these issues are at stake, Al-Shaykh reinforces the chaos that is war and shows that the norms that regulate behaviour do not always make sense to those on the outside. War, then, only opens up the wound that we suspect but cannot accept is always already present; that social and political structures are not bound to any logic. Rather, war begs the question: what structures are secure? What remains that can constitute an/other reality beyond the one defined as normal and understood as such by Al-Shaykh and Ghoussoub’s Westerner and outsider? It seems, from my readings of the above works, that the suffering individual produces a different reality and a different normality in order to sustain a different kind of order, not only an order that is used as a measure against peace-time norms but an order that can make meaning out of the war-torn present.

Bride martyrs and servant heroines Mai Ghoussoub, in Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within, represents and interprets two unexpected protagonists of war; one, a social phenomenon who uses the war to explode her gendered status and becomes a war hero, the other who uses the norms of her femininity to excess in her self-sacrifice as a martyr of the war. These two figures again question ways of being a woman and what options they exploit, as well as what options exploit them. The narrator, herself seemingly surprised that women should choose these two supposedly male understandings of action, describes how the two women seem to find a unique way of interpreting the war that is intrinsically linked with death and with redefining one’s femininity through active participation in death; looking at death through oneself rather than seeing it only as the reality of the other. Ghoussoub introduces the role of the female martyr in her snapshot ‘Noha’s Quest and the Passion of Flora’. This particular description of a Muslim female martyr is peculiar because her reasons for sacrifice are bound up with the accoutrements through which she chooses to sacrifice herself.64 Through this it becomes apparent that there is little personal liberation in her act, as it is intrinsically bound up with her understanding of herself as a woman that is in turn bound up by certain regulatory norms. Unlike the war heroine who seeks to reconfigure the perception of herself as non-woman (to be discussed subsequently), Noha the martyr dies for nothing except a reaffirmation of her gendered status and her equally desirable submissive nature. The story is of a young woman martyr of the Lebanese war whose death speech is publicly televised. Noha, in a video recording prior to her act, speaks these words: Don’t think of me as dead, but as an undying symbol of sacrifice and combat against evil. You dreamt of seeing me in a white dress. Look at me. I am wearing the white dress. My virginal blood I offer to my cause, our

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Contemporary Arab women writers cause: the best and most honourable suitor. My blood is not mine alone, it belongs to my people . . . My people, my people, don’t feel sad. Dance, sing and rejoice in my funeral. Prepare yourself for the feast. This is my wedding day. I have written the word Martyr with my blood on the sheets of my wedding night. (p. 102)

Noha seems to be redefining the role of martyr by making it exceedingly feminine as she links it to the ideal of matrimony. Although this act undermines the idea of marriage as a connection between two people, it ratifies the traditional and social understanding of marriage as sacrifice and duty.65 Noha does not go out and fight wearing a wedding dress, she instead prepares to die wearing one. Does this diminish or demean her bodily sacrifice or does it constitute the only parameter within which she can enact a sacrifice? Noha’s description of her own death has a macabre erotic undertone to it: ‘I have written the word Martyr with blood in the sheets of my wedding night’ (p. 102). Political engagement here is ambivalent, as sexual language is appropriated by a virgin in order to legitimate her subsequent actions. The Sheikh’s words provide a juridically sanctioned approval: The martyr reaches a happiness that the ordinary believer does not know. The believer does not want to kill, for he is on this earth to glorify God. But if he has to die defending his religion then he is a martyr, and he will know the pleasures of Paradise. No pleasure is higher than that of worshipping God. And if this worship means that the believer should die or kill the enemies of God, so be it, for if death is inevitable, let it be honourable. The martyr’s blood is of beautiful red and its smell is that of musk . . . The world exhibits plenty of attractions, it has many wonders that can attract the eye and steal the heart. Money and gold and pretty women, they all play with man’s soul and reason. But when the knowledge of God is well rooted in a man’s heart, all these attractions turn into ghosts. (pp. 103–4) It is worth engaging for a moment with Spivak’s argument on sati in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and asking what it gained through the act of self-destruction: the discourse and doctrines associated with sati, or widow sacrifice, will here fleetingly illuminate those of martyrdom. Spivak argues that within the Dharmasastra: the profound irony in locating the woman’s free will in self-immolation is once again revealed in a verse . . . ‘As long as the woman [as wife: stri] does not burn herself in fire on the death of her husband, she is never released [mucyate] from her female body [strisarir – i.e. in the cycle of births]’ . . . Even as it operates the most subtle general release from individual agency, the sanctioned suicide peculiar to woman draws its ideological strength by

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identifying individual agency with the supraindividual: kill yourself on your husband’s pyre now, and you may kill your female body in the entire cycle of birth. In a further twist of the paradox, this emphasis on free will establishes the peculiar misfortune of holding a female body.66 Death is presented as a rewarding act that can entice women into self-immolation with the empty promise of an existence free from the burden of the body (or a material existence). Whether by misfortune or not, the scene of martyrdom that Ghoussoub describes invokes these same ideas, replacing the Dharmasastra with the Muslim Sheikh who gives his approval to the martyrdom of a young girl, invoking and manipulating the language of the wedding ceremony to paint a more palatable and accommodating picture of this act of destruction. The argument for sati within the Dharmasastra, that it can extricate a woman’s constraints to her body (hence figuring the body as a burden), is comparable to the example of martyrdom as Ghoussoub engages with the similar issues concerning the ‘misfortunes of holding a female body’. The woman who undergoes sati is not only given the chance to pay ultimate reverence to her husband, she is also given the opportunity to rid herself of the misfortune of being a woman. In the act of martyrdom, the woman too is given the opportunity of ridding herself of a body that is in turn sacrificed to a cause. Both these acts assume a woman’s desire for a sexless existence and promise a meaningful existence outside of their body, in death. Even self-sacrifice, presumably a personal choice, is here enshrined in strictly gendered terms that show up the lack of choice in actions taken. Noha’s death is configured as a marriage, a bride to her country. This again reinforces her womanhood, always already entwined in a language of marriage, the marital bed and blood. Although Noha’s personal ideals may be honest and understood by her as actively engaging in war, the method that she chooses (not martyrdom itself, but the elaborate performance attached to it) to manifest her loyalty only undermines its effect and once again reiterates the norms of a society and what it expects from its female members. Socially acceptable and sanctioned actions are allowed only after they have been cloaked in a seemingly loftier purpose; the unattractive prospect of self-sacrifice, be it martyrdom or sati, is made to seem desirable as it is given a spiritual interpretation and otherworldly possibilities. The woman who performs sati will be free from her material burden, the woman martyr will marry the land and nurture it (thus, although Noha is released from her physical constraints as woman, she does retain her symbolic characteristics as nurturer and carer, as well as, uncannily, a sexual partner to the fertile land). Similarly, women preparing to undertake sati undergo an enormous sacrifice that adds to their respectability and loftiness. The description of Noha’s death is likened, supposedly positively, to her wedding night. She is marrying and spilling blood for the cause as she would on her wedding night. This complex set of events begs the question of whether it is in this capacity that she can be a martyr and whether is it only in the capacity of a marriageable woman that she can be at all?67 Her act could also be seen as a comment on marriage – marriage as a

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form of martyrdom. A ‘modern nationalist militant’ in the text tries to answer this dilemma on a television programme about her death. He claims that Noha was beautiful: ‘she did not decide to die because life held nothing for her. She had many suitors dreaming of having her as a wife. She died because she loved her country more than her own life, and because her soul was even more beautiful than her face’ (p. 103). The representation of Noha’s death as marriage and herself as bride sexualises and makes male the land that she is dying for and that will receive her (God is at this receiving end as well). In order to cement the decision within the norms and moral encouragement of religion, the Sheikh recites praise to the martyrs of the land and stamps his seal of encouragement to this seemingly wasteful act (see above). In response, Ghoussoub writes that: The sheikh was speaking as if we still lived in the era when martyrs perished with a sword in their hands. And he speaks as a heterosexual man. No trace of Noha would ever be found among the rubble and the fires left by the blast of her car-bomb. . . . but since the sheikh is charismatic and the atmosphere is so loaded with tension, nobody notices such details. (p. 104) Tradition blurs the bloodiness of the acts of the modern-day martyr as exposed by Ghoussoub’s narrator. No skin or bones will be left of Noha, nothing physical to remind us that she was a beautiful girl who ‘had many suitors’. The essence of what she had, her womanhood and virginity, is what she willingly gives away as she remains caught up in the frenzy of sacrifice. Rather than a marriage that will lead to the birth of a new generation, Noha will die and marry Lebanon, or the version of Lebanon that she believes is worth dying for. Ironically, viewers and television announcers anxiously wait for Noha’s mother to forgive her brave daughter. The narrator finally tells us that [she] ‘heard through a televised medium that this forgiveness has occurred’ and that: What’s more, she was very proud of her, and she was preparing candy boxes with pink ribbons for the funeral. It would be a celebration. One well known patisserie that specialised in wedding cakes placed adverts in the paper, announcing that they were sending a multi-layered wedding cake which would have an icing-sugar heart on top, half in pink for Noha, and the other half in blue, representing her fiance´, the South of Lebanon.68 (p. 105) Noha’s mother pretends to ‘begrudgingly’ accept her daughter’s marriage. In keeping within the limits of a traditional wedding, she finally gives in to her daughter’s wishes and accepts her choice. This conflation of marriage and death strikes me as a morbid and violent one. In the attempt to glorify martyrdom her death is turned into an unsuccessful parody, a joyful wedding; grotesquely revealing what the institution of marriage might in turn be hiding.69

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Simultaneously however, the parody is a dismal failure, as the martyr must die and cannot thereby see the results of her parody, if indeed it can be defined as one. The sacrificing of her body is interpreted physically as dismemberment for the cause. Dismemberment contradicts the idea of unity on one level, yet on a violent level Noha’s body parts will be non-existent so that they can essentially become one with the land and air. The militia for whom Noha operates provides her with legitimisation: ‘Noha gave her pure blood and her beautiful youth to what she believed in, to our fight for sovereignty and national pride. Against the enemy and his Western allies’ (p. 103). After Noha’s wedding/funeral, her photo appears pasted all over Beirut. As with any war, martyrs’ reputations are quickly replaced and all that remains are bits of old posters under newer ones: ‘often you would see her lips, or half her face, still visible under a new photo that had been hurriedly plastered over the top’ (p. 106). In his article ‘On the Visual Representation of Martyrdom in Palestine’, Mahmoud Abu Hashhash writes that: ‘There is always space for one more poster on the walls of Palestinian towns. If the walls are overcrowded with posters, the new can always find a place over an older one.’70 Noha remains fragmented, even in her photos, never attaining individuality and experience, always a symbol and a fixed signifier to an arbitrary notion of nationalism that provides no space for her individual sacrifice. In contrast, Ghoussoub’s tells the story of a young militant, Umm Ali, who explodes gender constraints.71 Although her methods stand in an uncomfortable relationship to the argument for a passive activism, the war hero Umm Ali does, however, contribute to a way of being active in the war. Latifa, a young poor girl brought by her father at the age of nine to work in Beirut as a maid in a flat, is absued, exploited and raped within the household where she works as a servant.72 Latifa manipulates the war to escape her predicament and subsequently turns into a war hero. The story is told after her death; after her heroism is but a myth. The chapter opens with the following poignant lines: When Hayat told me that the famous Umm Ali was none other than Latifa, the little maid who used to live in their home, I found myself feeling confused and depressed . . . the image of Umm Ali, the new born legend on the fighting streets of Beirut, the ruthless fighter who knew neither fear nor compassion, ‘the sister of men’ as they named her, was already well sketched in my mind, and I could find no way of relating this ferocious, aggressive character to the frightened, evasive little nine-year-old Latifa that I had known. Umm Ali was large and powerful in my imagination, whereas in my memory Latifa was still victimised and vulnerable. (pp. 60–1) After eight years of confinement and servitude, Latifa is determined to prove to the soldiers who congregate on the street that she can be part of them; that she can dodge the sniper’s bullets and so be an asset to the army and recreate a place for herself in this new reality. Ghoussoub tells us that ‘she had learn[t] that

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if she wanted to fit in with these men she had to build her image as the girl who knew no fear – always the first to confront the enemy and the last to flee danger. She knew that the only way for her to belong was by turning herself into a legend’ (p. 71, my emphasis).73 Mona Fayad has noted, in her article ‘Reinscribing Identity: Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Writing’, that traditionally, women in nationalist narratives are ‘posited as begetter, inspirer and protector of male subjectivity. The disembodiment of Woman in the national narrative and her mythification render it impossible to position her as an agent of change.’74 However, Ghoussoub foregrounds a way in which the self-mythification process does in fact counteract the foreclosing world that is Latifa’s. Militancy does allow and give her the space to produce an image of herself that has hitherto been controlled and manipulated by others; by the family that sends her to Beirut, by the family she works for and who exploit her, and by their son who rapes her. Latifa uses the available discourse of war, that is, her control over her own death, to create for herself a place and a reputation that is outside and beyond that which is already socially inscribed as part of her identity based on her gender and her social class (unlike Noha). By becoming a legend, Latifa blurs reality and hyper-reality and crosse[s] the sacred line that separates the sexes and defines their difference . . . Umm Ali was neither woman nor man. Latifa was no longer the vulnerable little maid. The perplexed confusion that her name evoked fitted well with the tumult and chaos that was everywhere. Life and death were now closely bound together, and it was as if they created another reality. Why should not Latifa the girl, now become Umm Ali the very manly woman, be present simultaneously in places that were widely distant? (p. 74) Latifa/Umm Ali succeeds in fusing otherwise tightly controlled gender norms, to everyone’s surpise – ‘perplexed confusion’ abounds because it is not clear what she is. I like this idea of a new hybrid creation – not hybrid in the celebratory, congratulatory sense, but hybrid in the perplexing sense – where the origin is unclear and therefore theatening. Ghoussoub tells us that ‘Latifa, the young maid had crossed the sacred line that separates the sexes and defines their difference’ (p. 73). This latent, unpredictable aspect of war allows for a creativity that has no precedence. Latifa recreates herself using the available tools and this creation becomes a living, breathing monster, an artwork revered by others, eternally poised between life and death: ‘People who knew her, and those who only knew her by repute, were happy to inflate her legend. In their terrified lives only monsters and saints made sense, and only heroes and martyrs seemed cut for survival’ (p. 73, my emphasis). Here Latifa/Umm Ali occupies both spaces, both facets of the same horror. Latifa/Umm Ali recreates herself not only as a survivor but as an active participant. I am reminded of the repeated plastic surgeries undergone by the Palestinian militant Leila Khaled in her efforts to continue to fight her adversaries

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unbeknownst to them.75 This transformative will is precisely the stuff that myths are made of. Umm Ali leaves no photograph behind (unlike the martyr) yet she has succeeded in ‘stepp[ing] into another reality’ and thereby defying and redefining reality (p. 74). Her body, something that has hitherto only experienced misery and suffering, disappears, only to emerge sexless: ‘Umm Ali was neither woman nor man . . . her head was always covered in a keffiya [black and white check head covering] and her body flattened and anonymous under heavy military attire’ (pp. 71, 73).76 War can incorporate and support this myth/legend within its discourse, as it requires such legends and myths in order to mark its illusory progress and make time meaningful. Umm Ali transforms into a hero to turn the focus away from herself as woman, as gendered. The war can offer this space and liberate Latifa/Umm Ali from her demeaning existence described here: It was inevitably Latifa who got sent to fetch bread from the bakery when it was too dangerous to face the shelling and when snipers had emptied the busy street of shoppers. When Farid’s [her employer’s] family rushed down to the basement, alarmed by the closeness of battle and the wheezing criss-cross of the gunfire, it was she who was sent back to the flat to fetch the blankets, or the grandmother’s prayer masbaha [worry beads], or Farid’s medicine, or sometimes even the box of stale biscuits. As it happened, Latifa did not mind. On the contrary, she took her time as she went upstairs, savouring the silent emptiness of the flat. She even enjoyed being sent to the bakery, because from there she could watch the movement of the fighters as they crossed the street in zigzag formation . . . she felt no fear, but breathed an air of freedom in the new shape that the streets had acquired. She would soon be seventeen, which meant that she had been confined for almost eight years in this same street, with the narrow, unchanging view from the kitchen on the second floor where she lived. She found the changes that were now transforming this familiar, monotonous sight welcome and exhilarating. The threatening flash and thunder of the falling shells did not affect her; they were just a secondary backdrop to her newly acquired spaces. (p. 67, first emphasis in the original, subsequently my emphases) There is freedom in danger. Umm Ali feels no fear at the sound of the falling shells, only an exhilarated freedom. The memory of the woman Latifa is blurred over by the powerful qualities of the legend Umm Ali. Umm Ali does indeed relieve herself of what she considers female constraints and understands that she does have other possibilities and realities in the new space created by the war. Ghoussoub documents a reply by a Lebanese novelist to a French television programme on life in Beirut after the war: We looked as if we Lebanese had exchanged war for tarab, the sensual pleasure of music. In this programme they showed us preparing the material for our tarab, in the same way as we had previously prepared the materials necessary for the pursuit of war. The public watching the concerts is always

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Contemporary Arab women writers an intrinsic part of the festival, for anarchy is the order of the day: some sit, some stand, some dance between the tables and the seats . . . the audience does not differentiate between one singer and the next . . . it is as if the artist is just a mouthpiece for the songs that are stored inside the audience . . . It was as if our fun at night could match the intensity of the violence that was occurring during the day. (p. 31)

Tarab, or the state of exhilaration where time is suspended, is described as a emotion that can unite the audience in that it allows them to experience together something that is already ‘stored’ within them. Again, it is a pleasure that is enhanced and highlighted because of the situation of war, a peculiar enjoyment because it is savoured and emotions such as confusion, anger and relief are played out. This reference to tarab, an emotive word used to describe an enchantment elicited through a singer’s voice that usually results in giving oneself up to the music in reverie, emphasises the dual problem examined throughout this chapter, that of discovering pleasure at the site of intense danger. In this chapter I have tried to show that individual experience is what defines reality in the hyper-reality that is war. It appears that ideological norms are subject to revision in situations where these norms no longer remain sustainable. War, and in this specific context the Lebanese war, which cannot be explained in terms of a clear dichotomy between two opposing armies, becomes a site where religious, national and ethnic diversities are pitted against each other. In my examples, I have intentionally avoided signposting the religious identity of the characters in the novels or the novelists themselves. As I have stated in the introduction, the purpose of this chapter is to see how the added element of gender reconfigurations contributes yet another dimension to the war that allows for an expression of femininity and individuality that cannot be pinned down to any regulatory norm. I began by providing an outline of the criticism that has been undertaken thus far of war literature and its consequences and achievements. I have also suggested that this may not be a deficiency in the literature itself but a weakness in the interpretation given to the literature, that does not recognise active participation as political engagement. The example of the recent essay by Rajeswari Mohan paved the way to talking about female forms of resistance that actively applies issues of context. Although we cannot accept or condone violent activity, we can and must allow for the possibility that war creates a space for the investigation of experimental, gendered enactments of resistance. The reading of Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra highlights a potential for even the most disturbing of war victims. I have argued against the available criticism of this novel in order to demonstrate that Zahra’s actions can be viewed as masochistic yet narcissistic, an experience which enriches her life in that it makes her content and healthy for the first time in her adult life. The fact that it is the chaotic nature of war that enables her to seek the sexual gratification of her choice is significant. Rather than perpetuate her introvert nature, the war allows Zahra to escape confines. The madness of the war does not appear to be one

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with the madness of Zahra and the two experiences are not necessarily conflated. Rather, the state of war allows for Zahra’s relative physical freedom and the sexual freedom that she covets. Respite from the fear of the law brings with it a liberation of the libido. In Al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues and Ghoussoub’s Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within women experience sensual pleasures which in turn they use to understand the futility of the war. The liberation of sexual energies could be seen as a new lease of life away from deadly norms; however, the unintended outcome here is the seeming advocation of a ‘living feminism’ that can only flourish in the context of a destruction of ethical and social norms. Nevertheless, the circumstances of war show that normal society is deadening for women, and so the challenge becomes one of how to create new forms of social binding after the war, that will allow women the same kind of access to desire that they have had during the war. The vivid examples of the martyr and the war heroine illustrate how different attempts to become an active participant in the war can result on the one hand in excessive manifestation of imposed norms related to gender and on the other hand in an attempt that professes to be free of gender norms altogether. The martyr described by Ghoussoub does not escape her traditional expectation as woman and bride. Instead, she becomes a martyr using the tools of this expectation and spills blood for the land that is symbolically transformed into the lover that she will never have. On the other hand, Latifa/Umm Ali, by becoming one of the fighters of war and turning herself into a legend, thus unrecognisable as a woman, carves a place for herself that is not fully contingent on her being a woman. Mai Ghoussoub describes her as genderless and a ‘myth’, a construct that Umm Ali has ensured will outlive her. Umm Ali recreates herself as a genderless being by remaining unseen and turning herself into a myth for other people, in contrast to the high visibility of Noha’s death, revealed through posters and televised broadcasting. In this way she manipulates her reputation and dismantles the humiliation that she has suffered as a result of her femininity and poverty. By becoming an active militant she reminds us that there are other ways of being that are not tied up in the discourse of rape and slavery. The martyr gives in to absolute powerlessness; the militant acquires power; the others accede to their desires as women. Here, I have given an overview of some of the criticism around women’s writing of the Lebanese war as well as an examination of the works of Mai Ghoussoub and Hanan Al-Shaykh. I hope to have shown that a feminine resistance that is active but non-violent cannot always be the norm for all those who suffer the war. Although writing is primarily an act of non-violent resistance, the incidents within the writing itself sometimes point to situations that locate the difficulties in defining feminine resistance as always non-violent. In fact, through the readings I have offered, it seems that war provides a space for the reconfiguration of gender norms and expectations that make the issue of context even more significant. The issue of performativity, which assumes that there are certain fixed regulatory norms against which we perform our own resistance, becomes more complex once we begin to consider the differing regulatory

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norms that are created during a situation of war. Here, sexual and militant resistances are understood as paving a way for understanding oneself and one’s capabilities. The situation of war blurs and redefines ideas of reality, and the women in these three texts each react differently yet understand their actions as active ones fuelled by a desire to reconfigure what it means to be a woman in a war in which she is not expected to actively participate. They either use the tools available to them (the martyr Noha) or create new tools and rules of their own (Zahra, Asmahan, Ghoussoub’s narrator, Latifa/Umm Ali). Finally, the circumstances of war are what allow these women to manipulate their own experiences in order to understand themselves as women and to reinterpret what they are capable of outside of the previous regulatory norms. These norms lapse or lose centrality, and to an extent, in the situation of war there seems to be an inversion of norms. For example, a different, more violent idea of masculinity may develop as men struggle with issues surrounding combat and learn to accept that they may be called upon to sacrifice themselves.77 Simultaneously, there is less time for the surveillance of women who, ironically, acquire greater social freedom in a situation of danger. Ultimately, it appears that in normal society women are forced into deadly repetition and compulsions/performances which serve to deprive them of their desire out of fear of male power and violence. Thus, women’s supposedly normal sexuality is strangely akin to the Freudian death drive as it tends towards inertia or extreme passivity (this is in keeping with the fact that feminine desire is encoded in terms of passivity and masochism). What occurs in war is that inhibiting fear seems to give way to the necessity of active risk taking. This risk taking may expose one to the possibility of death, but it also removes the inhibitions of fear (the ethical law of the father, for example) and thus it frees the repressed libido. So, oddly and strikingly, war, for women, can be about ‘coming alive’ again; a resurgence of ‘aliveness’ and ‘desire’ (hence the seemingly antithetical equation of the violence of war and sexual enjoyment). If, in normal society, women’s sexuality is a kind of death drive (as opposed to pleasure principle), then, in war, a supposedly destructive tendency (that is, risking death) turns out to be the rebirth of libido and the will to live and thus, ultimately, a move against the destructiveness of war. Importantly, I want to argue that it is with the destruction of the old social fabric that women may achieve a liberation of their desire. However, this particular desire is asocial or antisocial, and with the cessation of hostilities the regulatory norms can always retarget this ‘asocial’, ‘amoral’ desire of women. Lastly, I want to emphasise that we cannot always take the view that women are intrinsically anti-war if we are to reveal the contradictions at work. The experience of war is not the same for women as it is for men and it is not only writing as an activity that is the sole domain from which women can resist or rewrite the war. The examination of the war narratives has shown that certain events within the narratives are themselves often controversial. To confront these events as possible and probable is to give women an active role in the understanding of their position in the situation that is war.

4

The Garnet series Translations1

Translation and rewriting Here I want to take a look at novels published as part of the wider project that aimed to make Arab women’s writing accessible in the UK: the Garnet Arab Women Writers series, published between 1994 and 1996. The series had a turbulent reception and although my study will touch briefly on this, the broader intention is to map out the concerns of these works and how they might participate in a debate about Arab women’s writing as a series. In other words, I seek the value of these novels as part of a set that distinguishes or draws attention to the concerns of Arab women writers. Furthermore, this chapter will offer a hypothesis as to the value of these novels, studied together, in that they offer an introductory glimpse of the problem of translation, both linguistic and cultural, that arises whenever a diverse culture is exposed for consumption and how this problem, or condition, further impinges on the reception of the subject matter. Although I will not investigate all of the novels in detail, I nevertheless intend many of my observations to apply across the different texts. In the introduction to their work Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, Amireh and Majaj point out that ‘contexts of reception significantly influence not only how specific works are read, but also which texts are translated, marketed, reviewed and taught, and which issues prioritised’.2 More broadly, in her article ‘Post-colonial Writing and Literary Translation’, Maria Tymoczko argues that: A literary translator is de facto concerned with differences not just in language (transposing word for word, mechanically), but with the range of cultural factors that a writer must address when writing to a receiving audience composed partially or primarily of people from a different culture. The culture or tradition of a post-colonial writer acts as a metatext which is rewritten – explicitly and implicitly, as both background and foreground – in the act of literary creation. The task of the interlingual translator has much in common with the task of the post-colonial writer; where one has a text, however, the other has the metatext of culture itself.3

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Here Tymoczko seeks to emphasise the similarity of the task undertaken by the translator and the postcolonial writer. In the case of, for example, the Arab Women Writers series, where postcolonial writers are being translated for the benefit of a new audience, the translator has the task not only of ‘transposing word for word’ but also of ensuring that a cultural context, which remains crucial to the postcolonial text, is equally translated, though it may not form the foreground of the original work itself. Therefore, the translator of postcolonial texts is doubly burdened, as this cultural background must somehow make its way into the translated text without appearing as an appendage to the narrative flow, as well as avoiding oversimplification for those readers who may be somewhat familiar with the original cultural context. Though it is possible to argue that this is the challenge all translators face, in the particular case of the Arab Women Writers series, translators have also to deal with the particular, volatile positioning of the authors themselves: as Arab, as women and as public writers. Specifically, whereas postcolonial writers writing in a dominant language, such as English or French, choose to write for a particular audience and can therefore choose ‘which cultural elements to transpose to the receiving audience’, a postcolonial writer who is being translated does not have this same choice (p. 21): Because a translator begins with a text intended for an audience in the source culture, however, it is not uncommon that elements that are difficult for the receiving audience will cluster; a translated text more than an original piece of literature thus risks losing balance at critical moments, making the information load too great for comfortable assimilation by the receiving audience. (p. 22) Tymoczko makes the case for the translator/publisher’s prerogative to include ‘introductions, footnotes, critical essays, glossaries, maps [in order to] embed the translated text in a shell that explains necessary cultural and literary background for the receiving audience’ (p. 22). However, in the case of the Arab Women Writers series, the series editor, Fadia Faqir, provides an introduction to each author and each work, rendering the role of the editor and the translator distinct. It is perhaps the distinct visions of both that have rendered these particular works the object of some ungracious criticism that I shall discuss below. Farida Abu-Haidar, reviewing four of the five translations in 1996, here asserts her awareness of the complexities involved in translating Arab women’s literature. It is through: using a language which oscillates between the classical and a register approximating the vernacular, [that] the four authors succeed in articulating Arab women’s experiences. The occasional use of the colloquial in the dialogue gives their writing an added authenticity. No reader can approach these works with detachment and impartiality, but as a participant sharing

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the experiences of the characters and the events they live through. This aspect, together with the still uncodified use of an innovative and personal Arabic style by all four authors, must make a translator’s task a highly demanding one.4 Ironically but not surprisingly, it is this experimental writing style, so significant to the writers under examination, that presents a challenge to the translators. Elsewhere, Abu-Haidar has claimed that: Contemporary Arab women writers seem to be constantly experimenting with the thematic and linguistic structure of the Arabic novel and short story. Some tend to introduce into their texts authentic dialogue from their own spoken languages and unconventional themes from their immediate surroundings. Despite the strongly held view that shared Arab political history, language and social customs have no national boundaries, the discerning reader cannot but be struck by regional differences which characterize the works of some authors.5 Here Abu-Haidar admits to the complexity of translating writers who are themselves pioneering a new writing style. In the words of the series editor, Fadia Faqir, the authors create a different language where . . . women’s daily experiences and oral cultures are placed at the epicentre of the current discourse. Since the dominant language excludes them, they pushed standard Arabic closer to the colloquial in order to be able to present their experiences as completely as possible.6 The novels are here presented first and foremost in their capacity to overturn dominant linguistic conventions in their appropriations of different principles for self-expression. Though not quite Cixous’s ´ecriture fe´minine, Faqir does here foreground a feminised and politicised context for this new, or at the very least, experimental, writing style. A recent reissuing of one of the books in the series by the American publisher The Feminist Press includes a new foreword by Cixous, further legitimating this feminist context. Abu-Haidar acknowledges the fact that ‘it was primarily to make modern Arabic fiction more accessible to the general reader that the present Arab Women Writers series was created’ (p. 278), suggesting that the series has a social as well as an aesthetic dimension: to profile Arab women writers but also to present their work in an approachable and engaging manner. It is in the light of these aspirations that Abu-Haidar and Hussein Kadhim criticise the failure of these books to achieve positive audience response. Although I will discuss the differing viewpoints of these two critics, it is worthwhile noting that the works themselves are given uncritical praise (as though the original works themselves are beyond investigation) and the translations and editor bear the brunt of the critique. Abu-Haidar praises the

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achievement of a certain ‘authenticity’ in the works, thus excluding the nonArabic-speaking audience from the challenges these novels enact: thematic challenges of representation, exposure and disclosure. As Luise von Flotow argues in Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’: Gender awareness in translation practice poses questions about the links between social stereotypes and linguistic forms, about the politics of language and cultural difference, about the ethics of translation, and about reviving inaccessible works for contemporary readers. It highlights the importance of the cultural context in which translation is done.7 Taking these constraints into account, Abu-Haidar praises Sophie Bennett’s translation of Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter and Dinah Manisty’s translation of Salwa Bakr’s The Golden Chariot as subtle, nuanced and skilful (though I nevertheless found many technical problems in reading these translations): ‘Both [novels] abound in rhyming collocates which Arabs seem to delight in introducing into their writing or conversation. Thanks to the translators, collocates do not lose their efficacy in the English versions’ (p. 279). I understand here that Abu-Haidar regards translators Bennett and Manisty as having managed to capture some of spirit of the source works and successfully carry this over into English. Abu-Haidar praises Martin Asser’s translation of Hamida Na’na’s The Homeland for producing both a linguistically and argumentatively astute text: ‘Asser has not only managed to turn his translation into a free-flowing text, but he has also succeeded in capturing the feminist sentiments expressed in the novel, conveying them to his readers in a language full of lyricism’ (p. 280). This clearly serves two functions: one the one hand, feminist sentiments are given a predominance when translated into another language, whilst on the other, feminist concerns come to take centre stage in the discussion of these novels. In Abu-Haidar’s comment on Asser, not only is the translation endorsed, but also the main thrust of the argument is exposed and centralised. Conversely, Samira Kawar’s translation of The Eye of the Mirror is described as ‘an almost word-forword translation of the Arabic’ (p. 280). Pithily, Abu-Haidar notes that ‘Kawar does not seem to have an adequate command of current English usage to allow her to be the sole translator of this work. Her translation should have been checked and revised by someone whose English is more fluent’ (p. 281). Although Abu-Haidar provides examples of where she reads Kawar’s flawed translations that alter the meaning of particular moments in the text, it is nevertheless more productive to view Kawar’s verbatim translation as one that attempts not to tamper with the texture of the narrative in order to provide for a varying experience of the original source text. In her review of how translations claim ‘responsibility for meaning’,8 Von Flotow investigates the different ways in which translators might engage with the text on various levels through notes, commentary, introductions and personal references, in order to maintain a dialogue with the process of translation and the difficulties it creates. Whereas

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Abu-Haidar commends three of the translators for maintaining narrative integrity (an integrity that escapes definition), what is essentially being praised is the ability to translate the text into a more accessible English version (which is understandably the aim of the series). Nevertheless, as a series, the challenge is surely also to reveal the variation produced in the act of translation itself. What I mean here is that another aim of the series was to foreground the restrictions, limitations and processes of choice that are inherent to translation (i.e. to make this noticeable in the texts themselves) and to make obvious how this can result in reading practices that are not predictable. I mentioned earlier that the novels in the series often come across as technically difficult to read. Specifically, I mean that the texts demand a different sort of expectation – an expectation that the text will not sound comfortable ‘in English’ precisely because it was not produced in English (or whichever language one chooses). Though Abu-Haidar does point out errors in the other translations (and to an extent a native English/Arabic speaker may find fault with many of the words and phrases translated, based on location and register), her critique maintains that this ‘make[s] it seem that there was little discussion or consultation between the translators and the editorial team’, an accusation which suggests a solution that is ultimately unquantifiable (consultation at translation level cannot really be measured, p. 281). The response to these accusations by Samira Kawar (in the spirit of honest publishing practice, the response is included in the same issue of the Journal of Arabic Literature as AbuHaidar’s review) picks up on some of the criticisms directed at her translation and invites us to tackle the problems that a translator may face. Kawar finds Abu-Haidar’s response to the novel to be as ‘skin-deep’ as the critique of the translation.9 Abu-Haidar does not seem to have troubled to ask herself whether or not the translator and copy-editor (the latter is indigenously British, by the way) purposely chose to preserve the style and flavour or the original Arabic text. After all, certain words and phrases defy logic in many different languages, and an author may have opted to use them for precisely that reason. (p. 294) In fact, Kawar engages with these accusations in a fluid and concise English, thereby implicitly revealing her command of the language. This complicates the argument, as her choice of register is clearly no longer based on her competence in English but rather focuses on a different level, that of broader, philosophical debates surrounding faithful translation. Translators, I understand, have the prerogative to make ‘translations perform what the source text does in the source culture’, whose original intention may in effect be that of mischievously confusing the reader.10 Kawar herself admits that ‘there is no doubt that the translation’ of this work ‘does present a unique set of problems, not least of which is whether to preserve the exact Arabic-language imagery which the author was at pains to create, or whether to alter it, very possibly diluting it, to suit the tastes

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of the idiomatically fastidious critic’.11 Von Flotow, in her discussion on translating feminist work, has suggested that the subject matter itself (disruptive and unsettling, as Faqir herself suggests in the introduction to the novels) may provoke the translator into revealing the ‘translator-effect’ (translator-effect would here mean making evident the ideological standpoint of both the source text and the translation).12 In a discussion on the work of Barbara Godard she describes how it is: logical for feminist translation to stress difference, deterritorialization (the fact that the text has been taken out of its territory), displacement (the exile of the text into another culture) and contamination (the confluence of source and translating languages), rather than fidelity or equivalence.13 One might ask how, if fidelity or equivalence are sacrificed, intelligibility (of the type expected by Abu-Haidar, or any other reader, including myself, who might find the text difficult) might be assured. One answer would be to forego the quest for uncomplicated intelligibility (what happened and to whom) and surrender to experiencing difference on both a linguistic and cultural level. Another is to question, in our case, the overall direction of the series in order that we may pick up clues as to what types of reading are envisaged. In her introduction to Kawar’s translation of The Eye of the Mirror, editor Fadia Faqir, clearly aware of the complexities involved in translating this particular text, points out the risks: translation is an act of negotiation . . . this delicate balancing act entails being faithful to the spirit of the Arabic text while presenting a fluid text for the English-language readers . . . This translation is both idiomatic in English and also faithful to the full power of the original text. Samira Kawar has great personal understanding of the situation in the Palestinian refugee camps, stemming from her own experiences as a journalist in Beirut during the period in which this novel is set. (My emphases)14 Here, it is clear that a straightforward and simplified (what I might venture to call abridged) translation is rejected in favour of one where the translator attempts to interpret an effect and remain faithful to the ‘full power of the text’. Writing specifically on the translation of Alia Mamdouh’s Mothballs (the last in the series and one separately reviewed by Abu-Haidar), Hussein Kadhim, in his article in World Literature Today, also takes issue with series editor Fadia Faqir.15 Admitting that the novel ‘relies heavily on the interior monologue technique and is characterised by a frequent switching of the spatial and temporal frames of reference’, he nevertheless does not take the time, within the confines of the review, to provide examples of the intense difficulty of translating this work.16 Rather, he hastily commends the publishers for undertaking this task whilst simultaneously undermining the qualifications of the editor, claiming that her degrees in English and Creative Writing do not legitimate her position as Arabic literature and language academic – an unusual criticism, as the translations are into

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English. In fact, Kadhim argues against Faqir’s contention that dominant written Arabic does not adequately provide for the experiences that Arab women writers attempt to represent (thereby trying to undermine a feminist agenda). This proposition is one that Faqir brings to each introduction to the novels, thus grounding the socio-political impetus behind the series firmly in the status of an ostensibly patriarchal Arabic language that is not female friendly. For Kadhim, these statements do little but reveal Faqir’s insufficient knowledge of the Arabic language.17 It is also possible that Kadhim is unwilling to entertain the idea that the language used in these novels may indeed be experimental (in that the authors do not adhere to a consistently recognisable first- or third-person narrative). My analysis in the previous chapters has shown how Arab women writers have been innovative in terms of both style and themes. Kadhim does not concede that it may be necessary to strategically create a new language in order to attempt a depiction of very particular experiences by women writers who are politically and socially aware of their gendered roles and want to emphasise this through their reconfiguration of language. Kadhim’s claim that ‘charges that Arabic is inadequate to present religious and social experiences are not new [and have] sometimes been politically motivated’,18 seems to have at its root an ideological conflict concerning Arab literature that is perhaps insurmountable and irreconcilable with the aims of the Arab Women Writers series. Faqir’s introductory statements to Liana Badr’s The Eye of the Mirror point to a different starting point altogether. The aims of the series indirectly (or perhaps directly) challenge and engage with Kadhim’s stance: To redress the lack of interaction with Arab culture, the Arab Women Writers series was started. The series hoped to open a window on the walled garden where Arab women’s alternative stories are being told. Out of this private space Arab women sing their tales from countries which still, to a great extent, treat them as second-class citizens. Women writers in this series create a different language where the patriarch is lampooned and ridiculed, and where women’s daily experiences and oral culture are placed at the centre of the discourse. Rejecting the standard perceptions about masculine and feminine language these women writers have created a third space within the language from which they can question a culture which has been based on exclusion, division and misrepresentation of women’s experiences. (My emphases)19 It appears that political motivation and a strategic positioning is necessary for a series of this kind. Faqir’s aims as editor seem irreconcilable with critics, who have varying expectations based on linguistic or political preference. Unprecedented and open to all types of arguments, be they based in aesthetics, politics, or feminist debates, this series can only impartially be evaluated through a close analysis of both the events fictionalised and described and the extent to which language enables us to participate in the debates disclosed for our benefit. In order to assess the lasting value of this series as a gateway into Arab women’s

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writing, it is necessary to explore how they each internally impart locale as well as an engagement with broad issues that makes it very difficult to homogenise their target audience, particularly in translation. As I am reading and discussing these works as translations as well as as part of a series, these parameters will inform the analysis. Though it could convincingly be argued that their relationship to each other is purely incidental, I will argue that, nevertheless, their formation as a focal point (in Britain at least) of Arab women’s writing in the 1990s marks them as somehow indicative or designative of Arab women’s issues, such as they are.

Pain, suffering and ideology: the ‘Palestinian’ novels She had only become endowed with such vitality during the war. (Liana Badr, The Eye of the Mirror)

Two novels in the series have as their subjects the question of Palestine and the Palestinian question of ‘home’. Liana Badr’s The Eye of the Mirror and Hamida Na’na’s The Homeland treat diverse concerns revolving around similar issues. The Eye of the Mirror recounts, in great detail (and often with documentary precision), the story of an interconnected group of persons in the time leading up to the massacre at the Tal Ezza’tar Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut at the start of the civil war, while The Homeland recounts the memories and thoughts of a Palestinian refugee fighter now living in Paris.20 In a particularly fascinating way, The Eye of the Mirror provides (albeit not specifically) a backdrop to a political cause not clearly defined in the The Homeland. In its depiction of suffering, Badr’s work enacts the frustration implicit in the protagonist’s musings in Na’na’s work. Whilst I do not wish to suggest that these novels can be read in sequence or in tandem in order to arrive at an understanding of cause and effect, I do want to advocate that the two novels complement each other in that they allow the reader insight into the ideological helplessness experienced by a former freedom fighter in a present where inertia, experienced as a symptom of exile (punctuated by self-reflection), has replaced the energetic drive for survival and combat revered in times of danger. In their article ‘Palestinian Women and the Politics of Reception’, Therese Saliba and Jeanne Kattan argue that: Arab women’s texts are more often interpreted not within the anticolonialist/ nationalist framework, but rather within one that ascribes the worst form of sexism to Arab-Islamic culture. More often, these interpretations discard the entire political–historical context of women’s literary production, rendering Arab society as a timeless, unchanging world of ‘traditions’ hopelessly oppressive to women.21 The problem here, for a critic, is whether to prioritise those works because they reinforce a particularly nationalist agenda, in order that a case can be made for

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women’s roles in these nation-building activities, or whether a detailed examination of the experience of gender holds more currency in the global market (where developmental intervention is the visible benefit/beneficiary of these experiences).22 Interestingly, examining the two Palestinian texts included in the Garnet series through a postcolonial feminist framework may provide a solution where both nationalist and gendered representations are viewed as almost inseparable. Thus, rather than serving a specific agenda – for example, to either ‘promote’ the Palestinian cause on the one hand or to list feminist grievances on the other – it may be possible to illustrate not only how productive looking at both of these directions simultaneously can be, but more importantly, to illustrate their connections and resolute links. In their research into the reading habits of young Palestinian girls,23 Saliba and Kattan discover that ‘literary reception is thus conditioned by the material conditions of military occupation, as well as by a social/political context, bound by the imperatives of nationalist struggle’ (p. 85). Material conditions, the burden of representation, the uncontrollable forces of reception and the needs of the global market are only some of the parameters within which ‘Third World’ or ‘postcolonial’ women writers work. In her article ‘A Country Beyond Reach: Liana Badr’s Writing of the Palestinian Diaspora’, Therese Saliba emphasises the nationalist struggle that is at the core of Badr’s concerns. She is keen to remind us that ‘Badr’s writings situate women’s experience at the centre of nationalist struggle, as they document the survival of Palestinian national identity and consciousness of the diaspora.’24 Whilst this is a key issue in Badr’s work, what makes the nationalist cause volatile is the absence of a ‘land base . . . a country from which to struggle’ (p. 134). In order to understand how the nationalist struggle gains momentum when it lacks a border within which a definitive Palestine can exist, Saliba argues – using Said – that what Badr is configuring is a ‘transnational struggle based on a claim to homeland, human rights, and dignity’ (p. 134). Effectively, Saliba is suggesting that Badr utilises this absence of a border/homeland in order to ‘transform masculinist codes of nationalism into a nationalism that may be understood in transnational or even feminist terms’ (p. 135).25 Here, Saliba accords Badr’s work with the potential to speak across borders and to highlight humanitarian claims such as the right to ‘homeland, human rights and dignity’. Although I discern sincere conviction in this line of argument, I remain alert to the difficulty of reading into Badr’s writing an altogether ‘feminine’ or ‘transnational’ understanding of the methods through which one can redefine the nation. Contrary to Saliba’s assertion, it seems to me that the alignment of transnationalism with justice and human rights (i.e. liberal positivism), in opposition to the pitfalls of a masculine nationalist consciousness, risks ignoring other complex local factors. An appeal to Palestinian rights as universal rights may not always be voiced in the terms that pacify transnational or liberal feminist expectations, and we need to be alert to this. As Rosemary Sayingh, in her article on the methodological problems encountered when doing anthropological research in the refugee camps, claims:

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My contention here is that the masculinist nationalist consciousness frequently prevails in Badr’s text and that a reconstruction of its success will allow us to perhaps witness the future possibility of its rupture from within (in other novels such as Badr’s A Compass for the Sunflower or Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns). It is important here to make the distinction between what we may want the text to demonstrate in terms of a forward-looking transnationalism and the inevitable materiality (even essentialism) located in the text. This is particularly important with novels that deal with unresolved issues, such as those encountered within the context of the Palestinian struggle that concern the role of women, the experience of gender (both masculine, feminine and homosexual), sexuality and ethnicity, all of which require attention. Brinda J. Mehta, in her article ‘The Mothers of the Intifada in Liana Badr’s The Eye of the Mirror’, argues that women are given a more central role in the Palestinian struggle for liberation than is conventionally thought and that they appropriate what might otherwise seem simply domestic chores and turn them into acts of resistance (such as making bread and finding innovative ways to survive). Though these measures are compelling and significant, Badr’s novel is not primarily framed in terms of a recuperating mission for women’s roles during what is broadly defined as the intifada. What is experienced in the story is not only the struggle for liberation but a defence and struggle for life and self-definition (throughout the work we are told that ‘no one is coming’ and that ‘no one cares’). If anything, the people in the story feel stranded from rather than part of the Palestinian cause, a satellite of the struggle that suffers in isolation and that drinks lentil water in desperation. The characters in the text negotiate their surrounding within an internal border, that of the camp, and with an external border, that of a Lebanon that will not house them. This experience of being at once within and without, where the location of a nationalist sentiment is one that crosses geographical boundaries, is an experience that is undergone in the text. Nevertheless, the struggle involved in the upkeep of daily life competes with the momentum required for an ongoing ideological and political affiliation; in fact, I often wondered, in my reading of the text, whether we are not in fact being asked to specifically make this connection. The horror of the events does not always transform smoothly into an apologia for the wider cause (i.e. this is happening and it is terrible but it is all for a good cause and here are the ways that the women are coping or subverting their expected norms, etc.). Rather, the events themselves, in their full representation of horror, do not allow for a glib transition from suffering to cause. Whilst Mehta argues and illustrates how the

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‘double bind of national and gendered disenfranchisement that dominates the lives of women nevertheless instigates the creation of an effective womancentred war story or narrative of resistance in the face of loss and alienation’, what I feel might be overlooked in this line of argument is the disenfranchisement and suffering experienced by all.27 My sense is that Badr’s novel recreates and thereby allows for the imaginative re-experiencing of the event for men and women alike (a type of memory-place or tableau). The detail with which Badr furnishes the scenes is a testimony to the elusive yet completely visible horror and suffering of those undergoing the siege. A telling episode towards the start of the book casts the roles of power that dominate the text within an idealism necessary to all those who have invested so much in the idea of the Palestinian struggle for a homeland. Aisha, a young Muslim girl and one of the protagonists of the story, calls her father ‘papi’ by accident (a word Aisha picks up from her brief stay with the Christian nuns). Her father, disgusted by his daughter’s appropriation of the French word, violently calls to his daughter to answer for this slippage: She never knew how her tongue had gone out of control, and how the word had broken loose from her . . . he had roared a scolding in her face, before indulging in a sharp sarcastic fit of laughter: ‘You, shame on you. We’re Palestinian’ . . . ‘We’re Palestinians,’ he had said, as though he were continuously searching the heavens and earth for excuses to humiliate her. (p. 23) Language and national identity are here conflated for her father, Assayed, who, although represented as an overbearing and insensitive father and husband, is also a victim of the demanding nationalist sentiment. The underlying principle of his permanently exiled existence is understood in terms of his Palestinian identity, one that is so essentialist as to become all encompassing (as the above example reveals), the love for it only temporarily reversed when living conditions become impossible. During particularly heavy shelling, even Assayed would ‘begin cursing God, the Arabs, the bastards and Palestine itself. Had it not been for Palestine ‘‘we would not be in this terrible fix’’ in this strange land’ (p. 26). Aisha, unable to qualify her experience in terms of wider (albeit cruder) debates, concentrates as the ‘echo of the crackling weapons continues in her ears with the stinging rhythm of the bullets, whose din has not stopped inside her brain’ (p. 27). Whilst the rhetoric of nationalist pride overwhelms those living in the refugee camps, the material reality of their existence requires this rhetoric to make it bearable. Popular culture (including art and music) reflects and also produces this rhetoric clearly in the novel.28 Assayed and his friends ritualistically resurrect images of Palestine whilst drunk on arak: Assayed would refine his voice as though he were chanting holy verses. The names of Sayyed Darwish and Saleh Abdel Hayy would turn into gems imparting a blessing to those mentioning them or touching them. Their

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Contemporary Arab women writers singing of ‘Why oh Violet’ and ‘Oh Zaghlouli Dates’ and ‘I Fell in Love and Expired’ would ring out as though during those moments they were avenging their wasted lives. The music and reminiscing would go round inside the magic circle created by the dancing tunes in the smoky, stuffy air in the corridor topped with a metal roof . . . towards the end of the night . . . their voices would clash as each assured the others of his early detection of the signs of the tragedy and the signals foretelling their fated and bloody exodus from Palestine. 29 (pp. 71–2)

The novel attempts to produce an inclusive experience that both accepts and rejects the imposition of a necessarily antagonistic nationalism and I would argue that the details of battles, covert operations, injuries and suffering cannot be covered up or co-opted by a politicisation of the text (i.e. forgivable in the service of the Palestinian cause). Whereas The Eye of the Mirror clearly depicts often unbearable detail, Hamida Na’na’s novel challenges and repudiates this suffering in its overtly intellectual look at the Palestinian cause, one that is suffused in an equally necessary glory. Here, heroism and resistance, both requirements of successful myth making, are romanticised and theorised, removing the ideological struggle from its mistakes, losses and those it has left behind. Whereas Badr’s treatment of events, where life in the refugee camp comes almost to stand in for the physical reality of the condition of being Palestinian (changeable, unsafe borders; unreliable resources; disjointed nationalist pride) and is ruthlessly depicted as an ‘inmate condemned to a long sentence that could last a lifetime’ (p. 67), Na’na’s depiction of the infinite deferral of what it might mean, finally, to be Palestinian, facilitates an ongoing myth-making industry. This slippage is not openly challenged in The Homeland. Here, the homeland is worth fighting for, certainly worth dying for. The Eye of the Mirror appears more concerned with individual interpretations of the situation not always anchored to an affiliation to the cause at large. Even the brave fedayeen are not always able to retain a steadfastedness expected of them and their laments reveal the cracks in nationalist discourse. Often, they are represented reconsidering the sacrifices that are expected of them. As one of them, George, muses: In the past, he had only cared about the collective fate. In this enemy wilderness, he was surprised by strong impulses which he had not experienced before. For the first time, he saw himself as responsible for his own personal happiness, even before that, for his own individual survival. Before, there had been the country, the family, the extended family; then the organisation, the establishment, the party. Everything, except for himself. (p. 244, my emphases) I want to suggest that these unexpected thoughts from the one character whom we expect to be unwavering in his commitment refute a glamorisation of the

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fight for freedom and independence. Rather, the tone of regret and the bitterness levied at the ‘organisation’ and everything it stands for serve to remind us of the difficult and often unreconciled sacrifices that are demanded of its members.30 Discussing the role of martyrdom posters in his article ‘On the Visual Representation of Martyrdom in Palestine’, Abu Hashhash reminds us that Neither the words ‘death’ or ‘suicide’ ever appears on posters. There are ‘martyrdom operations’. But the way these posters present the sacrifice of the individual does not reflect the magnitude of people’s daily suffering. Representations of martyrdom conceal and dissimulate death as a grim fact and assimilate it to eternity and the infinite – if not with the ‘actual’ eternity promised by Paradise . . . The everyday emphasis on the celebration of martyrdom might be understood as a collective self-defence against the absurdity of everyday devastation, backed by every possible mythical, religious and historical value in order to make this daily dose of death not only meaningful but absolutely inevitable.31 Whereas the production of the martyrdom posters knowingly privileges the space of ‘eternity’ in order to take the focus away from the ‘absurdity of everyday devastation’, a sidelining or erasing of the ‘grim facts’ is not an option for Liana Badr. Nevertheless, Badr is keen to reveal the idealistic dreams that support a vision of Palestine worth dying for. I have found Tina Sherwell’s ideas on the ‘re-mapping’ of Palestinian identity to be particularly useful.32 Here, Sherwell argues for a close look at Palestinian ‘micro-communities’ in order to trace how ideas of the homeland have changed and evolved, depending on distinct socio-political circumstances. For example, Sherwell notes how the presentation of the physical landscape of Palestine changes in artistic representation as a result of political decisions both by the internal parties representing the various Palestinian factions and, more genereally, by external politics (p. 230). This idea of a micro-community that establishes its own norms and internal policies whilst still maintaining ideological links to a desired but illusory homeland is useful in understanding the conditions inside the Tal Ezza’tar refugee camp, as depicted by Badr. Though I do not intend to compare Palestinian micro-communities to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, it does occur to me that Gaza, for example, is currently experiencing confinement and financial hardship of a sort that is not metonymically far from that of a refugee camp. Producing and maintaining a sense of national cohesion can turn into a full-time concern. Sherwell notes that earlier Palestinian artists such as Hassan Hourani, Sliman Mansour and Nabil Anani created works that [h]ave their roots in this tradition of creating utopian representations of the homeland . . . compos[ing] idealist images of the Palestinian village and countryside. These represented not a specific village but one with the ideal characteristics of a homeland undisturbed by modernity and set in a golden era of social equality and harmony . . . the diverse sites of displacement

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Contemporary Arab women writers culminated in the ideal village, the imaginary return in the lost homeland. This pictorial tradition took shape in the new forms towards the end of the first intifada, as artists worked with natural materials such as mud, wood, herbs, natural dyes and earth. (p. 432)

Here, artists of the first intifada worked towards constructing abstract representations of loss; a loss that is nevertheless, through art, materially relived in the present. In contrast, writing on artists in the pre-1982 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Kamal Boullata argues that the ‘art produced by camp artists [was] figurative and often reflec[ted] the explicitly narrative imagery popularised by the nationalist rhetoric of the time’.33 A particular perspective on the homeland here becomes a sacrificial gesture; personal memories are turned into fixed compositions that may then be refigured into national memory. These refugee camp artists ‘sought to express a collective cry that claimed to represent the Palestinian experience and that solicited support for the national cause’, thereby collapsing the particular in the service of the general.34 For example, Boullata, describing the work of Isma’il Shammout, foregrounds what Sherwell calls ‘picturesque’ art: [his] canvases were peopled with destitute figures from the refugee camps determined to regain the lost homeland. His later paintings depicted optimistic images of heroic fighters, dancing women in national dress, and arcadian representations of the liberated homeland. Shammout’s visual repertoire often eclectically borrowed from social-realist models, which he adorned with familiar peasant clothes and artefacts.35 Here, a micro-community constructs and represents a vision of the homeland that reflects on the particularly isolated circumstances of the refugee camps in Tal Ezza’tar whilst it produces a nationalist consciousness. As Sherwell notes, it is important to remember that ‘what may be more noteworthy than the notion that Palestinians carry with them an original site of displacement is how this site is experienced, remembered and represented’ (p. 430).36 Na’na and Badr’s texts perform different acts of remembering as they turn their focus to diverse ‘site[s] of displacement’. Hamida Na’na’s The Homeland tells the story of Nadia (loosely based on Leila Khaled, the well-known Palestinian militant discussed here in Chapter 3), a guerrilla fighter and former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Her exile in Paris is a painful one, but her self-fashioning as an exile who inhabits memories of the past is intriguing nevertheless. The novel is set in 1977 and charts the thoughts of its protagonist, who recalls her time as an active participant in the struggle for a free Palestine. Numerous issues arise out of this first-person narrative, retold as an interior monologue. Although issues such as exile and gender roles within the liberation movements are worth examining in more detail, it is the wider concerns of the novel, surrounding the

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role of intellectualism in revolutionary ideology, that are of interest to me here, as they provide another dimension to the issues discussed above. As Nadia recalls, ‘Freedom and Palestine are still nothing more than distant dreams.’37 The idea of Palestine itself needs to be continuously dreamt of in order to be kept alive. In the absence of a fixed border, the definition of Palestine and the idealisation of Palestine remain porous and flexible, with various groups and factions competing for what the definitive definition should be. One of the competing discourses or, let us say, fuelling mechanisms behind the PFLP is a refined Marxist ideology as understood and refashioned for the circumstances. Hand in hand with this comes a rather French-leaning intellectualism that pervades the text and lends a romantic tone to the revolutionary activists. As Benita Parry notes in her discussion of the power of anti-colonial discourse: ‘the identity struggle of one community can serve as a model for other resistant discourses’ where methods of action and struggle can be ‘communicated to different situations of context against the authority of the dominant by marginals, exiles and subjugated populations’.38 It is important in The Homeland that this cross-cultural affiliation is made in order to humanise the struggle. Remembering her early days as a guerrilla trainee, Nadia recounts how she looked ‘again at the history of revolutions and the men who made that history. Vietnam. Cuba. Bolivia’ (p. 33). Furthermore, this very ‘revolutionary’ text falls in line with what Parry recognises as an anti-colonial counterdiscourse that seeks to intellectualise and theorise the struggle without necessarily alluding to the material difficulties of acting on that intellectualism (as acted out by Badr’s protagonists).39 Rather than categorising The Homeland as a novel that displays all the signs of a revolutionary text as ‘nativist, essentialist, atavistic and wedded to pre-modern ideologies’, I instead want to suggest that the book reveals the necessary and strategic, yet oftentimes blind, mythologising (bringing the distant past to bear on the non-existent present and an imagined future) that underlines revolutionary practice in general and in this case the Palestinian cause in particular.40 Instead of attempting to represent the menacing truth of militancy, the book attempts to re-enact a triumphant intellectual genealogy; that it fails to do this and is self-conscious about its failure is testimony to the necessity and authenticity of its attempt. Remembering her reaction to the 1967 Arab defeat during the Arab–Israeli war, Nadia writes: ‘I am just a poet, one of the coffee-house intelligentsia, who is staring her defeat in the face and who is unable to do anything to stop it’ (p. 23). Here, defeat is an abstract event, contingent on individuals sympathising with a cause rather than living its effects. This figure of the poet, however, is revisited throughout the text, particularly in the figure of Frank, a lover modelled on the French Marxist Regis Debray. Recalling one of his activist-related lectures, Nadia’s memories are steeped in regret and disillusion: The lecture hall filled with students from Third World countries. You talking about Palestine, Central America and Africa. I have come to listen to you. I have come to see you, now that you are out of prison and back in the

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Contemporary Arab women writers land of milk and honey. My friend tells me that you have finally given in to your bourgeois background and that you are content with the memory of your former comrades. You have come back to France to write stories about them and how they met their deaths. The beautiful scented ladies received you as a hero, and your name is proclaimed from their temples. They needed a myth, so they fashioned one out of your life and gave it to a country which no longer has any legends of its own. (p. 31, my emphasis)

Moving backwards and forwards in time, Nadia’s hopeful memories intermingle with the bitter aftermath of their downfall. I want to suggest that this movement is a crucial one, as it alludes to the most difficult component of any political struggle: to maintain the necessary physical energy and intellectual resolve. The collapse into inertia, as evidenced in Aisha’s behaviour in The Eye of the Mirror, reflects the enormous difficulty in maintaining momentun in a continuously volatile and exhausting situation: Um Jalal noticed that Aisha’s face was as pale as turmeric, and that she was badly in need of original olive oil from the home country to improve her health . . . Um Jalal would say this knowing full well that she would be unable to arrange a permit to visit, but it was wishful thinking which she voiced in front of her children whenever she felt hemmed in by a despair she was unable to conquer.41 (p. 73) Whereas here, hope is maintained through allusions and connections in everyday dialogue, for others in the novel, such as Aisha’s father, it is rage and anger that fuel this energy. In The Homeland, energy for the belief in the cause seems to come from the exchange of ideas, from the constant talk and discussion, endless negotiation and determination, helped along by the continuous changing nature of the struggle itself, its methods inconsistent and its conclusions yet to be written. Unsure what heroes to follow, the poets ‘Mahmoud Darwish and Samih alQasim’ or the revolutionary ‘memoirs of Che Guevara’, the militants seem forever suspended between these two discourses (p. 34). I wonder here to what extent Na’na is attempting to position the idealistic struggle for a homeland alongside the real blood that must be shed in all acts of violent revolution. Here, Nadia’s sensationalising of weaponry and deadly killing machines reveals the thrill sought and found at the site of violence: I became familiar with the different kind of weapons and telescopic sights, including an old French service rifle which had a kick on it that I still feel to this day. I liked the Czech rifles most of all. In the first two months after my arrival I used everything from small pistols to heavy machine guns, including M-16s, Thompsons, Carlos and Kalashnikov Ak-47s. (p. 35, my emphasis)

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In juxtaposition to the pleasure derived from her connection to these guns, that perhaps stand in for and strengthen the vision of a liberated Palestine, the ideological base on which the struggle is founded is not always clear. In fact, the fedayeen who undertake brutal fighting in The Eye of the Mirror do not always partake in an ideological discourse that is recognisably revolutionary. A more general mythologising based around the figure of the martyr, for example, is what the people in the Tal Ezza’tar camp understand and negotiate, in both its brutality and inevitable necessity. Mothers mourn and bear the mourning of their sons through reconfiguring them as martyrs. However, in The Homeland, Nadia’s struggle to maintain an ideological grasp on the situation is often at odds with the men in the group. Ranking herself superior to them intellectually, she seeks to ‘do something about their political naivety’ and ‘to find a way of closing the linguistic gap’ that keeps them apart (p. 35). However, Nadia herself seems too fixated on revolutionary heroes such as Che Guevara who ‘accompanies her wherever [she] goes’ (p. 35). It is he who provides a model through which she can understand the other fighters: ‘My comrades look like heroes as they wait in the early hours of the morning for the moment of action’ (p. 35). Through configuring her comrades as heroes, Nadia performs a risky but perhaps necessary move. Here, heroism is recuperated as an enabling subjectivity that temporarily stifles the tedious and often mind-numbing activities associated with combat. Whilst I do not wish to suggest that there is no place for utilising the revolutionary ideology of others, I do want to emphasise that this may distance the understanding of the militant events as they unfold within a very specific context. As a disappointed Nadia remarks, they do not share similar ideas: I am a woman and I do not really speak the same language as them. I talk about ideology [while] their preferred topic of converstaion is the towns in the Arab world where they have lived, and their grasp of ideological discourse is almost non-existent. I see it as my job to do something about their political naivety. (p. 35) Whereas Nadia may read these conversations as inane and uncomplicated because they do not aspire to loftier principles, Na’na may be offering up these conversations as more truly reflective of the Palestinian project: to be a full member of the Arab world, to have towns that are lived in and visited without fear, to be able to realise a dream where those towns in Palestine are also now vibrant towns in the Arab world. In The Homeland Na’na reflects on the consequences of masking political struggles with ideological rhetoric. Astutely, though, she also represents the seductive qualities of revolutionary rhetoric. It could be argued that both are critical in volatile struggles that lack a central geographical and socio-political focal point. Whilst both novels address the issues surrounding particular moments in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, they present us with two very different ways of viewing the difficulties associated with each. Whereas The Eye of the Mirror is keen to reveal lived

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moments of struggle, where material issues is such as the lack of sustenance, suitable living conditions and suffering is experienced by all members of the community alike, The Homeland complicates this issue of the homeland by depicting the contesting definitions that seek to maintain a hold over the minds of the people at different times. That both of these books are included in the Arab Women Writers series should alert us to the fact that the varying and oftentimes conflicting accounts of how the narrative for the struggle of Palestine should be represented is an ongoing and unfinished daily project. Whilst the representation of struggle founded on either borrowed or homegrown revolutionary ideology is of utmost importance, so is the bloody mess of warfare. Upon hearing that her second son has been martyred, Aisha’s mother-in-law, Um Hassan, in The Eye of the Mirror beseeches God to listen to her this one time: My God, you have orphaned me, your obedient slave, who has always borne patiently the suffering you inflicted on me . . . You have broken my back. We have suffered so much, Oh God. We have been eating lentils and more lentils, and we haven’t complained. Bread! Nothing but the mouthful we have offered the fighters before ourselves. Water? We don’t even have enough to wet our mouths. No gas, no kerosene. We baked over the wood of collapsed houses, and broken doors, yet we accepted all this. For every glass of water we’ve drunk, there has been a glass of blood from the person who brought it. (p. 178) Though poetic, this plea to a God that has forgotten the people of the Tel Ezza’tar camp reveals the limits of suffering. Nevertheless, in the same breath, re-articulating her commitment to the cause, Um Hassan cries: ‘Why don’t you do to our enemies what you are doing to us?’ (p. 178). Read together, these two novels offer complex representations of the Palestinian resistance. Both are crucial in that they do not allow for the strict division between ideology and practice, thoughts and suffering.

‘There are crimes of conscience which human laws fail to rectify’: Bakr’s The Golden Chariot42 Salwa Bakr’s 1991 novel The Golden Chariot tells the story of female inmates in an Egyptian prison between the 1950s and the 1970s, all of whom suffer imprisonment for crimes that are, in terms of the narrative and if read from a polemical perspective, unavoidable. In many ways, their deeds remind us of the limitations that they face as women and the necessity that drives them to kill and harm, whether intentionally or through negligence. Critics have argued for the enabling structure of the novel that gives a voice to the voiceless: While Salwa Bakr has chosen the novel as the form and prison as the setting for the re-examination of women’s location in the gender order and the

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various ways they resist this positioning, her text also mobilizes the political prisoner’s silence in combining the generic and disciplinary diversity of personal account, ethnographic report, cultural critique, review essay, and political analysis, collectively suggesting the reciprocal and developing parameters, both academic and activist, social and political, for engaging with women’s issues precisely through women’s own engagement with these issues.43 While it is difficult not to agree with Harlow’s proposition and to view the text as an enabling performance of the potential located in women’s engagement with the issues that restrict them, I find that the setting of the novel blurs these conscious re-examinations. The prison, a location that I discussed earlier in connection with the work of Nawal El Saadawi, though it allows for a voicing of emotions and confessions, restricts the politicisation of these very emotions and experiences of confinement (both within and outside of the prison walls) that permeate the lives of the women.44 What is revealing is the fact that the life outside of the prison demeans and humiliates these women who nevertheless find the necessary will to act. Imprisoned, they have the option to speak and have their say about their actions (two very different moves). I want to argue that Bakr’s novel is a tough commentary on those who may want to assert that the prison narrative is an enabling one. Through privileging speech and writing, I sense that we diminish the acts that these women commit; their grounded attempts to defy the law, or, as I argue below, to expose, through acts, a complexity that written law cannot hope to encompass. Harlow argues for a subversion of state expectation when she writes that: What the state, and with it the traditional order, construes as women’s ‘crimes’ punishable by law are recast as gender issues – abuses, determined by class, as well as by gender oppression – against the women themselves.45 Yes, they are cast as gender issues that the state does not want to have to deal with; nevertheless, through committing the crimes, Bakr’s protagonists reveal that they have already construed their acts as a ‘gender issue’ and take the law into their own hands. Take Hinna, for example, a woman who discovers that her husband is about to take a second wife, the lastest act in a long line of humiliating gestures. In prison for having ultimately murdered him in order to be rid of him, Hinna is at long last able to share the real concerns and problems that she endured at his hands, not least of which was his insatiable desire for sex, a fact that Hinna was not able to share with the judge and lawyers at her trial (p. 38). Being forever forced to be prepared for unwanted sexual advances is at odds with Hinna’s perception of herself as a ‘wife from a good family or an exemplary mother’ (p. 40), roles that she cherishes and that socially, have great significance for her. Entering into her sixties, Hinna is finally able to reject her husband’s advances. Certain, however, that he is now having an affair and terrified that this may result in the loss of her home (rather than in the loss of her husband), Hinna decides to murder him and after having ‘taken this important

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decision she felt spiritually at peace and behaved calmly with her husband, ignoring his curses as if everything was normal’ (p. 50). Significantly, Hinna’s spiritual contentment comes with making a decision that is arrived at and judged necessary by her. Without wishing to demean any realisation that she might arrive at as a result of imprisonment, it is the decision to take action in order to ensure her protection and survival and to feel spiritually at ease with this that is remarkable: as Hinna narrated her story to Aziza, the first person to hear it since she killed her husband, she discovered a truth which she hadn’t thought of during the long years of her life: that she had to free herself from the husband with whom she had lived for forty-five years before she had dared to kill him. Perhaps it was a stroke of good luck that she recognized this truth after she had grown old because if she had killed him when she was much younger than she was now, the court, which had been concerned by her age and state of health, might not have entrusted her fate to Azrael and would have handed down the usual punishment for such a crime – the death penalty, or at the very least a life sentence. (p. 38, my emphases) Here, Hinna’s need to free herself from the husband’s command is seen very separately from the act of killing him, an act that merely expels him physically. Freeing herself from him is her reward, arrived at as a result of a certain maturity.46 Her punishment, I sense, is not because she killed him but because, by doing so, she showed that she had no need of him, was not beholden to him, was no longer under his law. I want to take a moment to elaborate on the paradoxical life from which Hinna attempts to escape; a life that presents her with conflicting and irreconcilable messages about her role as woman and wife. In her article ‘‘‘ I am a Whore but Will Be a Good Mother’’: On the Production and Consumption of the Female Body in Modern Egypt’, Lucie Ryzova charts the production and representation of the sexualised female body for public consumption in illustrated magazines and other forms of popular culture (such as cinema) from the 1920s onwards against a more conservative opinion, promoted in the public sphere, of women’s role in the home and a cautious but ongoing ‘debate about female emancipation’.47 Ryzova argues for the contradictory representations of women’s choices that work to promote conflicting images of what it means in the end to be a good mother and a good wife. Ryzova contextualises and historicises the changes in the public representation of women’s bodies that could explain and chart the development of this seemingly accepted contradiction (though I would argue that there is no contradiction at the level of discourse, it is certainly a contradiction for the suffering individual who is caught at the confluence of these mixed messages). Aggressive sexuality is made acceptable for consumption in popular culture and ultimately, Ryzova argues, the married couple’s home. Her conclusion, as I understand it, is that traditional power

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relations are not dislodged, merely temporarily camouflaged. In The Golden Chariot, Hinna becomes alert to the irreconcilable aspects of her life as a woman and to the paradoxes of discourse that force her to accept them – being a good wife takes on un/expected meanings: the whole business became a problem which took hours of Hinna’s day; she adopted the boy scouts’ motto: ‘Be prepared!’ to be ever alert for these marital demands. She would bathe, put kohl on her eyes, powder on her cheeks. She would expose as much as possible of her arms and breasts over which he liked her to let her beautiful black hair hang loosely, like a frisky young filly. In this way she would appear, as he always wanted her, like a tart in one of those nightclubs which had spread all over the city and not like a wife from a good family or an exemplary mother who never took her eyes off her children except when compelled to attend to the needs of her troublesome husband. (p. 40, my emphases) What is so compelling here is that these three edicts: be a good mother, be a good wife and attend to the needs of your husband, are all part of the same constricting forces that validate Hinna in the public sphere. However, it is her inability to accept the performance of the sexualised image that her husband expects of her in private, constantly undermining her role as mother and dutiful wife, that leads her to cease all sexual relations with him (freeing herself from him). After gassing her husband to death (whilst she remains miraculously ‘unscathed’) Hinna is accused of premeditated murder: the curious thing was that she seemed to believe her story completely and became enraged every time the prosecution mentioned the word murder; it was as if she were being accused of something she had never done. In this way, during the whole period of her investigation and trial, she remained extremely irate at what she considered gross injustice. She was angry with the prosecution whose representative persistently exaggerated the accusations against her, insisting she was an old evil beast who had devoured her benefactor and the person closest to her, violating all the laws of morality and the godly laws which were ordained by religion. (p. 51, my emphasis) It is clear here that the official law’s understanding of morality cannot approximate the ethical dilemmas and irreconcilable experiences that Hinna suffers. Once the judgment is given, Hinna feels a ‘relief from the burden which was weighing heavily upon her (p. 51). Rather than denouncing Hinna as ‘mad’ for committing murder, or construing madness as a legitimating space, it seems more fruitful to consider Hinna (as well as the other women in the prison) as primarily responsible for their own spiritual, or anything else one might wish to call it, peace.48 Unable to simply exist through accepting an arbitrary rule that happens to coincide with their perceived weakness as women, Bakr’s characters

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recognise that certain situations unfold beyond the confines of current public law and that, quite simply, they need to be countered through a private law. Nevertheless, the consequences of this are punishment at the hands of the very real penal institution. This points to a certain tragedy that nevertheless allows the women another form of reprieve, this time from the pretence of ‘womanhood’.49 Hinna, we are told, ‘experienced the first moment of real happiness’ when placed in a ward with older women like herself (p. 51). This unexpected happiness further emphasises the incarcerating qualities of the categories of wife and killer. While Hinna’s decision to kill her husband is arrived at without a thought to the prison sentence, she nevertheless finds happiness there. This is doubly important for us, as it places her actions within the realm of justice for justice’s sake, where punishment plays no part in the act. Aziza, the inmate who constructs this imaginary ‘Golden Chariot’ that will take her and other inmates of her choice to heaven, stands out as the character who seeks a solution outside an unchanging system. Al-Nowaihi points out: And yet how can we fail to be touched by Aziza’s fervent desire to offer these women a second chance and ensure that they have access to justice and compassion in this other world? I believe it is precisely the otherworldliness of this dream that Bakr is attempting to undermine, and instead to doggedly insist that the focus of desire must be to ‘achieve justice and mercy on earth.’50 This seems to me to take a more enabling turn, though I would want to insist that in many ways justice is served and women are the ones who are serving it on their own terms. Without wishing to promote mass killings as a solution to gender inequality, I do wish to point to the process of decision making that allows these women to replace gender and sexual imprisonment with institutional imprisonment; somehow, this further invalidates and undermines the role of the state at this juncture. Unable to change the conditions of their crime, it can only sequester them from its location – the public sphere. Al-Nowaihi argues that: although the prison world, with few exceptions, is indeed one of limited movement and choices, it ultimately comes out as the kinder and gentler of the two worlds, for most individuals are shown to have very little control over their conditions or the results of their actions in the outside world . . . Indeed, Bakr exposes the very institutions over which the premise of the Egyptian state is built, and unmasks their claims to serve and protect the people as mere fabrications, and by extension the loyalty and trust that its so-called leaders demand from citizens as undeserved at the very least . . . [this absence of justice] is in large part due to their realisation of the abysmal failure of the three major institutions of any modern nation: the police, the army, and the judiciary. (p. 15)

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Though it is possible to critically focus on a justice-for-all model when interpreting Bakr’s intentions, I am more interested in the characters’ own understanding of their situation. Aziza, realising that in fact the ‘benefits of prison’ are limited, nevertheless admits that they do allow her time for ‘contemplation’, away from ‘all the daily trivialities of life in the vast ocean of humanity’ (p. 73). Not oblivious to the adverse situation in which she finds herself, Aziza can, however, accept the benefits for what they are, rather than for their metaphorical or symbolic associations. Seymour-Jorn has commented that: Salwa Bakr is a writer with a clearly reformist intent. She says that she condemns prevailing Egyptian norms, social specifications and cultural assumptions as they are responsible for the unhappiness of women.51 Whilst this is undoubtedly true, Bakr also takes a bold step in revealing how women themselves often resist questioning their conditions. Those that do, commit crimes, as they are unable to imagine a different way of coming to terms with these injustices. In fact, punishment is represented as being equally out of the hands of public law and out of the hands of the perpetrators of the crimes. The definition of law and justice is reconceptualised through the stories of inmates’ suffering. Aziza thinks that: There is a law unknown to conventional justice whereby revenge can surface in a thousand different ways. It is possible for the victim to take revenge on the wrongdoer simply by invading his being with remorse and thereby tormenting his conscience and soul. (p. 95) Though El-Sadda argues, and I agree with her, that Bakr ‘rewrites the ground rules of cultural discourse by rejecting the basic assumptions that are put forward as natural givens’, the novel itself also presents us with examples where the ground rules are not only rejected but also reconfigured entirely.52 Bakr does more than ‘[offer] an alternative’: she depicts characters dealing with the practices that are available to them, practices that go beyond the status of hypothetical ‘alternatives’.53 As El-Sadda points out, ‘the development of the novel is not linear but cumulative: one experience is added on to another in a long sequence of episodes stitched together. The novel does not so much tell a story as project a live gallery of women in society’.54 This gallery reveals not only potential alternatives but lived experiences that need to be read for what they are and need not stand in for solutions but may instead be understood as practices in a particular space and time. I want to end this section with a gesture towards Caroline Rooney and Judith Butler’s work on Antigone, where ideas relating to state law and its inapplicability to many experiences can help us think through and push the limits of the experiences undergone in Bakr’s The Golden Chariot. Rooney argues that, within the context of her actions, Antigone is no longer part of the recognised ‘family’

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of men (the question of course remains whether she ever was), she is ‘not-part of the family’. It is with this assertion that Rooney ‘[spirits] Antigone into [her] discussion’.55 Indeed, this state of being is something that Antigone shares with the women of Bakr’s text. In a sense, they do not exist, or are not spirited or given life, until their realisation that they are not part of the family that they thought they were. Each woman is rejected or humiliated for not being other than she is: In Sophocles’ Antigone, Antigone – as far as Creon is concerned – breaks the law. Antigone acknowledges her guilt in terms of these laws – laws for law and order which she does not contest as such. But she also says that these laws of men do not really concern her – hers are ‘unwritten laws’, lawless laws.56 This idea of the ‘lawless laws’ is indeed fascinating, as it suggests that lawlessness may have its own internal logic that operates as another law, an unwritten one. Not only are there no written laws to protect women like Hinna, the laws that are there (obey your husband and you will always have a home) are not to be trusted, as they are not enforceable. Any actions taken by these women, be they actions that are acknowledged to be within the law or not, are met with similar contempt and imprisonment through the very terms of the law itself. Endowing Bakr’s characters with political potential is also not an issue to be entered into lightly, unless we were to completely ignore or rewrite the actual physical experience of imprisonment. Whilst it may offer some degree of spiritual liberation and an opportunity to voice opinions otherwise silenced, the fact that the women are put away minimises the political effect. Rooney’s argument with reference to how we might read Antigone’s act is useful for organising our thoughts on this matter: In my argument, the question of ‘another politics’ refers both to political agendas that are given no legitimacy, no recognition, as to what is allowed entry into the sphere of politics, and to a politics not recognised (not seen or understood) as such.57 If, in turn, we decide to confer an alternative political meaning on the actions undertaken by the characters in Bakr’s novel, we need to be sensitive to the fact that their political actions are not legitimated and recognised in the ‘sphere of politics’, though we may, in the text, recognise them and accord them legitimacy as such.58 It is here that fiction writing is at its most powerful, where, as I have indicated earlier, the impossible becomes possible. Butler’s writing on Antigone articulates a further possibility: Indeed, it is not just that, as a fiction, the mimetic or representative character of Antigone is already put in question but that, as a figure for politics, she points somewhere else, not to politics as a question of representation but to that political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability are exposed.59

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It is possible here, for us as conscientious and politically attuned readers, therefore, to imagine these ‘limits’ of representability and to politicise those characters who pursue a radical agenda through a retelling of their ordeals. As Butler suggests, this points to the difficulty surrounding the emergence of these women’s voices in the public sphere. However, we should nevertheless take heed of Rooney’s assertion that we may not be able to ‘recognise’ the political action that is being made, just as the characters themselves do not at that instant of their utterance. In this case, it is almost too tempting to argue for the exposure of the limits of representability where the adjudicators of official law (those that imprison) are unwilling or unable to accept the flaws within the laws that they impose. Here, no amount of identification of the ‘wrong’ laws will be taken into account. We have no ‘outside’ perspective on the events in the novel (no Creon). In this case, I can only convincingly argue for the links that we are able to make in between the lines of the actions taken by the women and their reflections upon these actions. Thus, their education remains bound within the terrain of that which imposes the law (the prison) and can be read productively as an end in itself. Pursuing a broader political reading, I strongly feel, undermines the very immediate understanding and reflection on the actions undertaken and points to an unrecognisable future. Let down by both their families and the state, it is important to read these characters’ experiences for how they confront this double rejection and to accord them, if we wish and with caution, wider political meaning.60

Mothballs or Napthalene? I here wish to draw attention to last novel in the Arab Women Writers series.61 Alia Mamdouh’s novel Mothballs has attracted particular interest from American publishers and was reprinted by The Feminist Press in 2005. What is perhaps more intriguing, apart from its very apparent alignment to feminist concerns and debates, is its endorsement as such through a new foreword by He´le`ne Cixous and a new title and subtitle: Napthalene: A Novel of Baghdad.62 This edition also boasts an afterword by Farida Abu-Haidar. This framing of the novel – a leading feminist theorist, a title that positions the author as Iraqi, writing about Iraq, and an afterword by an academic who can contextualise Mamdouh’s subject matter, intrigues me. The English translation, by the same translator whose work on the 1996 Garnet edition Abu-Haidar warns us against in her 1998 article, has been altered in parts.63 The inside covers of the two books reveal striking differences that point to the discrepancies in the translation and distribution of Third World texts as discussed by both Amal Amireh and Gayatri Spivak. Where the Garnet edition blurb seeks to entice the reader on thematic grounds that are evocative and neutral – ‘seen through the eyes of a nine-year old girl, Huda, this novel beautifully captures the atmosphere of Baghdad in the 1940s. A city of public steam baths, of roadside butchers, of spinning tops and childhood games played in the streets, streets where political demonstrations are beginning to take place’64 – the Feminist Press edition

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outlines ‘a powerful coming of age story of a young Iraqi girl looking to establish her female identity amidst an oppressive patriarchal society and impending revolution’.65 Whilst I do not seek here to measure the ‘truth’ in the story against these diverging statements, I do wish to point to a set of distinct decisions that seek to determine the readership of particular works by non-English authors. Writing specifically about the translation of feminist texts (which seems to be a move enacted here by the editors of Mamdouh’s new edition), Spivak discusses the role of the machinery behind the translation and promotion (though I wish also to add reading here as a form of translation) of fiction: if you want to make the text accessible, try doing it for the person who wrote it. The problem comes clear then, for she is not within the same history of style. What is it that you are making accessible? The accessible level is the level of abstraction where the individual is already formed, where one can speak individual rights. When you hang out and with a language away from your own (Mitwegsein) so that you want to use that language by preference, sometimes, when you discuss something complicated, then you are on the way to making a dimension of the text accessible to the reader, with a light and easy touch, to which she does not accede in her everyday. If you are making anything else accessible, through a language quickly learnt with an idea that you transfer context, then you are betraying the text and showing rather dubious politics.66 Here Spivak makes a plea for the understanding of other texts that is not based on a preformed, prejudged idea of what one might find there. To participate in the reading of a text as an exercise in translation should be a participation that assumes the ‘individual is already formed’ rather than awaiting formation by you, the translator/reader. The protagonist’s grandmother in Mothballs, described as ‘the real power in the family’67 in the Garnet edition, becomes one of the ‘unhappy women chained to their fates’68 in the Feminist Press publication. Rather than participate in the formed subjectivities of the women, it seems that we are asked to engage and judge that formation; positive images become images of pity. Spivak’s words ring clear in her claim that ‘I am uncomfortable with notions of feminist solidarity which are celebrated when everybody is similarly produced’ (p. 190). Sensitively, Spivak’s call for language acquisition (beyond the academy) in the ‘attempt to learn the language in which the other woman learnt to recognize reality at her mother’s knee’ (p. 190, my emphasis) provides us with a working model. I think here it is possible to extend the idea of language acquisition into the genuine will to listen with which we approach translated texts whose ring is not too familiar (i.e. whose English, or French or German translation is not ‘literary’ in the same way). Faqir paves the way for this engaged reading when she ‘invite[s] the reader to open the book of Arab women’s stories’ and listen to their ‘clear voices’.69

5

Ahlam Mosteghanemi and Ahdaf Soueif ‘Physical textures’ and ‘exceptional events’1

In this chapter I want to pay close attention to certain attributes of Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s 1985 novel Memory in the Flesh and Ahdaf Soueif ’s 1992 novel In the Eye of the Sun, two works that explicitly demand that we re-examine and reconsider the unequivocal link between politics and the personal. These two novels, I want to argue, enact how the political and social are mediated, lived, performed and experienced through the personal. I have particularly chosen to concentrate on these two novels as they expose a certain level of introspection that specifically allows for an exploration of how personal lives and sentiments are influenced by wider demands and how these demands, be they political or social, determine personal experience. I do not intend to predict a shift, or even a new direction, for Arab women writers. As we have seen, the political and the social have always to some extent been interrogated and reconciled through the personal and even domestic front. What I particularly want to emphasise here, though, is the meditative spirit of these works, where an understanding of social and political events and their impact is only possible through their transformation into a relationship with a beloved, and specifically, a beloved who disappoints. Not only do the protagonists in these two novels invest entirely in their beloved, but this beloved also becomes a cipher through which ideals are tested.2 Memory in the Flesh and In the Eye of the Sun invest heavily in an idea of love, and show how socio-political contexts influence the very core of personal relationships.

I love you Algeria: Mosteghanemi’s Memory in the Flesh3 Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s4 novel, first published in Arabic in 1985 and translated into English in 2000, marks a significant moment in the trajectory of Arab women’s writing. The first Algerian woman’s novel to be published in Arabic, Mosteghanemi’s contains themes that are demanding and fiercely emotional. I have found little critical and detailed observation of this rich work, and what criticism I have located and will here engage with falls short of binding the reader to the detailed representations of obsession, love and desire. Rather, the criticism appears to fall back on narrowly feminist or conservative literary expectations that, though valuable, perform an injustice both to the work and to

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the possibilities engendered through a more expansive and inclusive feminist and postcolonial critique. Mosteghanemi’s novel is narrated from the perspective of Khaled, a wounded veteran of the Algerian War of Independence. Khaled writes his narrative in order to, among other things, cleanse himself of the effect of his beloved. Attempts to classify Mosteghanemi’s novel range widely, from its description as a ‘love affair between Khaled . . . the young daughter of his friend the freedom fighter’5 to considerations of the novel as: not only a reflection on, but a reflection of the modes of representation that have come to dominate the field of contemporary Algerian literature, dominated by male writers.6 A special issue of the journal Research in African Literatures in 1997, on the subject of Arab Writing in Africa, saw the publication of an article on Memory in the Flesh before its translation into English.7 Here, Aı¨da A. Bamia claims that the novel ‘revived the subject [of the Algerian War of Independence] with virulence and frankness’.8 This ‘virulence’ and ‘frankness’, however, reveals a subjective association to the text, which Bamia calls ‘extremely realistic and painfully real’.9 How the text enables this reaction is, I will argue, down to the accumulation of ‘physical textures’ that allow a variety of responses on both an intuitive level and an analytical one. Bamia’s article on the novel primarily praises Mosteghanemi’s ability to bring to the fore certain representations of post-independence Algeria, including the interrogation of the role of art and artists in this postcolonial state, the reverence (or lack thereof) towards martyrdom and sacrifice and the political intrigue played out on the Algerian social scene. Writing from a very different perspective and keen to contextualise the book within a history of female representation in Algerian writing, Ellen McLarney, in ‘Unlocking the Female in Ahlam Mustaghanami’, argues that Mosteghanemi’s choice of hiding ‘behind [the masculine] voice, pushing it to the forefront while she remains on the edges of the narrative, a silent, and perhaps silenced, participant’ functions as an ‘imitation and emulation of the masculine authorial perspective’.10 Bamia, on the other hand, views it as a liberating effect: Mustaghanami is able to stand at a distance to evaluate the situation, comfortably positioned behind the narrator, Khaled. Her views of women are thus expressed freely, without the risk of being considered either selfserving or those of a ‘woman against her sex’. After having been ignored and dismissed as lesser creatures by their society, women have achieved immense progress by raising their voices in writing.11 I am intrigued by the different directions attributed to Mosteghanemi’s work. On the one hand she is seen as silently and craftily recreating a masculinist discourse from within in order to undercut it, whilst on the other she uses the male narrator through which to denounce masculinist society and reveal her true views. Bamia’s comment is paradoxical, as it suggests that, through

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positioning herself behind the male narrator, Mosteghanemi ‘achiev[es] progress’ by raising her voice ‘in writing’. Whilst it is possible to read the text as one that recognises the inevitability of the presence of a tradition of masculine writing, the mere presence of a male narrator need not point to an elimination of the feminine voice (which is present in the text through dialogue and action) that can often function as an excess to the text, measured through the protagonist Khaled’s reactions to her words and actions. McLarney also takes issue with the absence of a fuller representation of the female protagonist, Ahlam (also called Hayat), when she states that ‘the female, or feminine, voice remains little more than a shadow throughout Dhakirat al-Jasad,12 vicariously experienced’.13 However, I want to argue that the text, through the shrewd and astute use of the male narrator, allows an unparalleled insight into the construction of complex gender relations in a post-revolutionary, postcolonial context. Though it is accurate to say that ‘through her male narrator, Mustaghanami mediates on the nature of the authorial voice as it has developed over the last five decades, outlining its characterisitcs and its inherent faults’,14 it is also possible to view the female character as other than the sum of all of these faults. As McLarney explains, these representations stem from a long literary tradition of female representation in masculine texts that, as Winifred Woodhull has described, is a tradition energised through its need to create female characters who are malleable and come to stand in for anything but specificity.15 Writing specifically about one of the many tropes used in Francophone Algerian literature to represent female characters, Woodhull states that In Algerian literature in French, la femme sauvage is a complex figure embodying volatile forces that resist incorporation into any fixed configuration of gender, nation, or culture . . . Both Nabile Fare`s and Kateb Yacine explicitly invoke the figure of the ogress in their volatile articulations of Algeria’s cultural complexity and the contradictory forces at work in the emerging nation.16 Woodhull’s discussion of two of Algeria’s most important Francophone male authors brings to the fore the aesthetic use of the ogress figure from Kabyle folktales,17 but also reminds us that the use of this ogress by these two authors is complex. For Fare`s: in Le Champ des Oliviers the ogress is both the full body of indigenous (Kabyle) cultural meaning and an indecipherable enigma disclosing the exclusions that both found and haunt every identity . . . and Yacine’s femme sauvage, Nedjma is able to gather the disparate peoples who comprise Algeria whilst simultaneously opening the national configuration to everrenewable forms and meanings.18 Clearly, though the female figures depicted by Fare`s and Yacine are not what we might call ‘individuals’, they are not simply symbolic either. Mosteghanemi

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seems to be well aware of these images, yet avoids recreating these figures or turning them into conspicuously subversive characters. Instead, I perceive a more apprehensive and ambivalent representation of both men and women; apprehensive in that it is not only willing to engage with familiar debates but is also distinctly more interested in attempting alternative modes of representation that resist national allegorisation.19 Writing on Assia Djebar’s work, Jane Hiddlestone maintains that: She is on the one hand clearly preoccupied with Algerian women’s particular experiences, narrating numerous scenes of female oppresssion and liberation occuring at different moments in the history of the country. She sets out to retrieve suppressed feminine voices as she reflects on the relation between women and writing, and on the importance of creating a sense of agency through self-expression. On the other hand, however, Djebar also unsettles the very category of femininity, dissocating herself from women’s writing movements and contesting the validity of any specified notion of feminine experience.20 Though I do not here want to explore the similarities or differences between the two authors, I do agree with Seymour-Jorn’s contention that whilst ‘compelling and sympathetic female characters’ have been created by Arab male authors,21 women’s agency becomes a more significant theme for contemporary women writers, as does the ‘process of breaking down stereotypical ways of thinking about women’s behavior and belief ’.22 It is possible to claim that while Djebar and Mosteghanemi’s methods are very different, their aims sometimes converge. Whereas Mosteghanemi, in Memory in the Flesh in particular, does not engage in an active retrieval and recuperation of women’s memory, history or literary tradition she does withhold the presentation of a particular ‘feminine experience’ that can be reclaimed by feminists. In this way, she resists an affiliation to a women’s writing based on presenting positive female characters but, nevertheless, compels us to work harder at enriching our definition of feminine characters. The novel is ambitious in its scope, negotiating a consideration of aesthetics, passion, desire and fear that coalesce when issues of nationhood and belonging come to the fore. Not primarily interested in setting up oppositions, the novel stages the intersections between dreams and reality, between idealism and realism. The difficulties of adjusting to a certain narrative in the present about the past are explored (after all, the Ahlam in the book has herself written a novel entitled The Turn of Oblivion). Whilst Ahlam and Khaled seem equally unable to distance themselves from the past, this past is configured in such distinct ways as to make it almost impossible for them to find common ground in the present. The incongruous nature of memory, coupled with a will to idealism and romanticism produced in the text, results in an overwhelmingly dream-like narrative where crucial issues of home and love fuse until the meaning of one threatens to suffocate the other.

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Memory in the Flesh seems to me to be an exceptional event23 in Arab women’s writing. Not only is the protagonist a male artist and ex-revolutionary fighter in the Algerian resistance, but the entire novel is expressed as a catalogue of suffering from a lover to his beloved. This choice enables a genuinely exceptional and inimitable condition where the conventions of gender limitations or expectations are pushed to their extreme, forcing the reader to re-establish ideas of agency and to rethink, however difficult this may be, the paradigms of gendered identity in Arab women’s writing. Where In the Eye of the Sun offers an intimate, frank portrait of this very paradigm, with all of its complexities and neuroses, Memory in the Flesh at times (and I shall return to this) functions as a cautious text, refusing to become a practical handbook to patriarchal and masculinist attitudes and preferring to see itself as participating (in the sense that it is energetic) in a debate on the fashioning of these very attitudes. Rather than view the events in the text as working to pivot the real against the ideal,24 a recondite question that requires a movement in a rather different philosophical direction, I propose a more flexible approach that seeks to understand the overall impact of the structure and development of the story as attempting to reconcile the complex figuring of both. Khaled writes of the pain and frustration of his artistic, political and romantic life. Contemplating the esoteric nature of writing, Khaled judges the wisdom of putting his thoughts on paper, of making them visible and of using them as a weapon: Here are the words I have been deprived of, naked the way I wanted them, painful the way I desired them. So, why does the shiver of fear paralyze my hand and stop me from writing? Am I only now realizing that I have exchanged the brush for a stylus and that writing to you is lethal, just like your love? (p. 3) Writing and its effects are crucial to the reading of this novel. Not only does the text act as ‘revenge’ in that Khaled hopes it to be a cathartic expulsion (similar to Djebar’s expulsion of her Beloved in So Vast the Prison), but the very action of writing is understood as performing a physical and public execution, an action required in order to truly comprehend the meaning of events: But I will not use a gun with a silencer the way you do. A man who carries a gun at this age cannot take all these precautions. I want your death to be as noisy as I can make it because in you I am killing more than one person . . . So read this book to the end, and probably after that you will stop writing fantasy novels and read our story all over again. (p. 31, my emphasis) Khaled claims to be writing a book where he can at last tell his story of his futile and destructive love for Hayat/Ahlam. The girl’s two names mean ‘life’ and

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‘dreams’ and act as a reminder of the perceived power of the beloved: to turn dreams into (real) life and (real) life into dreams. Writing here becomes a powerful weapon against any easy expurgation of the lover and simultaneously allows both the real and the ideal to co-exist. Writing, and its collusion with intimacies and secrets, is here used both to archive and to destroy love and the beloved at the same time, acting as a threat and a challenge all at once. In turning to writing, Khaled turns to his beloved’s armaments as writer – ‘Let me try your weapons’ (p. 31) – in order to fight back on an equal footing. Tricking us into thinking we are about to read the bitter narrative of a man scorned, the rest of the novel sets out to question and undo this expectation. Khaled narrates the story of his re-encounter with Hayat/Ahlam: ‘When I look back through my life, I find that the only real exceptional event was meeting you’ (p. 6). Now a middle-aged man harbouring the memories of Algeria’s anticolonial struggle on his mutilated body and struggling with the contradictory ideals of a post-independence Algerian malaise, Khaled’s meeting with the young Hayat is an encounter resplendent with rifts and enigmas. The conditions and limits of this encounter establish the future parameters of their relationship in their invocation of certain specific qualities associated with the past; it is also the most illuminating event in the text, as it performs the danger and perhaps inevitability of the will to personify abstract signifiers (such as home, belonging, love). This encounter challenges us to reflect on the complex interrelationships that are formed when discourses collide. Seen through the mental and emotional conditions that Khaled inhabits, namely those of regret, nostalgia and hopelessness, Hayat/Ahlam cannot but appear to Khaled as she does – not only because of what he, as a highly complex individual, brings to the encounter, but also because of who she is prior to their meeting. It is not possible for us to ignore this knowledge as we are given much detail, through Khaled, about Hayat’s father’s role in the Algerian war for independence and his martyrdom, veneration and heroism. The burden of a shared history, the Algerian war for independence, informs their meeting in ways that are at first too vast to be intelligible to either them or the reader. This seems to me to be crucial to our understanding of the text – rather than build up a relationship between disparate and disimilar characters, Mosteghanemi instead constructs two equally historically determined individuals. Through placing narrative control in the hands of the male protagonist, she perhaps reveals the haphazard nature of that choice. Khaled’s association with Hayat’s father is a profound event in his life: The coincidence of my being with Si Taher in the same cell was legendary in itself; the experience of struggle kept following me for years with all its details and might have had after that an influence in changing my destiny. There are certain men you meet that make you feel as if you have met destiny. (p. 19) When Khaled is injured, and Si Taher requests that he carry the name that he has chosen for his daughter to his wife, Khaled’s life becomes entwined with

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Hayat’s, particularly as Si Taher is subsequently ‘martyred’. Thus Khaled is endowed with the responsibility of naming this revolutionary hero’s daughter (temporarily named Hayat). Khaled delivers the chosen name: Ahlam. Though there is much here to support a reading in favour of undermining Khaled’s ability to ever understand or love Hayat for who she is (rather than for the associations that she holds for him) I think this would rather undermine the role of chance and her actions, and overemphasises the predetermined premise of their subsequent meeting as adults. Khaled and Ahlam’s meeting as adults cannot be and is not experienced in abstraction, and thus issues of gender stereotyping cannot be extrapolated from the scene to form a neat investigation into their representation, a project that Mostaghenemi undertakes in her critical writing.25 Here, Khaled’s memories and sacrifices for his country are what produce and form his existence. Reminiscing on his associations with the Algerian resistance movement and the death of his mother towards the start of the book, the ideologies and metaphors that pepper Khaled’s thinking are complex yet discernible: ‘The revolution was entering its second year and my orphandom its third month. I can’t remember now exactly when the country assumed the features of motherhood and gave me an unexpected mysterious affection and that obsessive sense of belonging to it’ (p. 16). Early in the text, we have an affiliation, or what could be termed an attachment, to the imagining of Algeria as mother, as carer, as giver. Upon his meeting Si Taher’s daughter, whom he has not seen since she was a baby, Khaled’s reactions are intriguing. The encounter, which takes place in Paris at the opening of Khaled’s art exhibition, deserves to be replicated here in full:26 You smiled at me, and I lifted my eyes to you for the first time. Our eyes met in a half look. You were examining my missing arm, and I was watching the bracelet on your hand. Each of us carried a memory, and we could have recognized each other just that way, but you were a mystery that additional details would only make more mysterious. So, I took the challenge of discovering you by examining you while you were absorbed and distracted, as if I had known you before and still was getting to know you more at the same time. (p. 34, my emphasis) Here, knowing or sharing a background with the other, based on a cultural affiliation, does not always bring with it a secure sense of familiarity. Sara Ahmed, in Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, argues for a move away from historicity as the only prefigured knowledge when strangers meet.27 Khaled and Ahlam are strangers, yet somehow not only bound by a set of events in the history of Algeria (a history or set of events that is impossible to ignore), but also bound in the knowledge that the history they share has been differently negotiated by each of them. Where Khaled invests in the memory of Algeria’s anti-colonial struggle, Ahlam seems to look away from this struggle, beyond revolutionary ideals and forward into an uncertain future that Khaled

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has deep misgivings about. Already, in their encounter, is the conscious knowledge, as well as the concealed wisdom, of the failure of this encounter to ever work on the grounds of a shared history, yet it is this shared history that can unite them: ‘How could I explain to you in a few seconds that I knew so much about you?’ (p. 43) writes Khaled, when, in effect, what Khaled knows about her comes from a shared history and nothing else (though what a burden a shared history can be). Only a page later, the folly of this love and its impossibility is revealed: I look at you and recall Si Taher’s features in your smile and the color of your eyes. How beautiful it is for martyrs to return that way in your looks! How beautiful for my mother to return with a bracelet, on your wrist, and for my homeland also to return today in your presence! How beautiful it is that you are you! (p. 44, my emphases) Here, Ahlam stands in for the aspects of Algeria that still retain meaning for Khaled: his revolutionary activity alongside her father, the love for his mother and his home town, the love for his country in abstraction.28 Here, we see that Ahlam cannot be depicted in any objective way; being likened to Khaled’s most treasured memories forecloses any opportunity of her being ‘you’ – there is no ‘you’ in many ways and this is perhaps what provokes Ellen McLarney into determining that in this respect, the female, or feminine, voice remains little more than a shadow throughout Dhakirat al-Jasad, vicariously experienced. The effect of this structure is that Khaled’s voice eclipses that of Ahlam, and she is buried under layers of abstracted images, metaphors, and symbols.29 Though tempting, this suggestion facilitates our identification with Ahlam (we side with her in sympathy) and removes the focus from the meticulous experiences assembled and represented by the author in the creation of Khaled (if we were to proceed with the above suggestion, all Khaled’s actions would read as a series of images, metaphors and symbols of Ahlam). What I find more compelling in the unfolding of this encounter is how Mosteghanemi captures the dynamics at play when persons meet, particularly in a context where a sense of socio-cultural knowledge (where the other is ‘from’, for want of a better phrase) is taken for granted and inspires the impression of a closeness or intimacy that may not actually exist (at the level of the personal, the erotic, etc.). Here, the stranger is not as strange as he/she might otherwise be (though it is questionable whether a pure stranger can ever exist), so how can we begin to theorise the encounter? If we take Sara Ahmed’s direction for a moment and concede that a stranger is one who is out of place, and I understand this to mean out of place because he is the other, then it seems to me that depending on what perspective we are allowed in a text, the other of the narrator will always appear at

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a disadvantage30 (in terms of us, the reader, understanding them). Ahmed here theorises the activity that occurs at the site where strangers might meet: This exceeding of the out-of-place-ness of strange bodies opens out the temporality of the bodily encounter: rather than simply understanding strange bodies as produced in the present encounter with an-other we recognise as strange, we can now theorise that such encounters slide not only through space (bodily space leaks into social space), but also through time (the present encounter reopens past encounters). The over-determination of the local encounter by the historical and social production of ideal, contained and closed bodies suggests that strange bodies remain threatening: they not only make possible the designation of the body-at-home, but also, at the same time, confirm the impossibility of such a body being at home, in the present, as such. (p. 53) In Ahmed’s configuration, bodies are not comprehended through their being recognised as different. Rather, we might want to think of strange bodies as being unrecognisable in and of themselves because they are already constitutive of a meaning that is beyond their recognition – in short, the presence of Ahlam makes Khaled feel at home: ‘In a diary filled with unimportant appointements and addresses, I circled that date, April 1981, as if I wanted to differentiate it from the rest of the days. Before that day, I didn’t find in my previous years anything worth differentiating’ (p. 42). Khaled sees in Hayat Si Taher’s features, his mother, his homeland. I like Ahmed’s idea of leaking, as it suggests that the encounter with Hayat/Ahlam summons an excess of signification that is perhaps inevitable and of which she knows nothing (we presume here that the same goes for Ahlam, though we do not have the narrative perspective to judge this); thus she cannot but be (1) her father, (2) the revolution personified, (3) Khaled’s mother, etc. because otherwise she would remain a stranger. Strangers here are placed through their associations, and when that association is deeply socio-historically grounded, these qualities come to form the overall parameters through which a stranger can be understood. Khaled finds his home in her, in what she betrays through her very presence. It seems to me that Mosteghanemi enacts the unknown and unfathomable capability of bodies to produce knowledge at the moment of the encounter – to spill or ‘leak’ over into the social and even psychological space without them ever being completely aware of it. It is important that the very first words that Khaled hears before their eyes meet are a discussion Ahlam is having with a friend as they approach him at the art gallery: ‘Je pre´fe`re l’abstrait,’ says Ahlam, whilst her friend proclaims: ‘Moi, je pre´fe`re comprendre ce que je vois’ (I prefer abstract art/I prefer to understand what I am looking at, p. 33). Here, the relinquishing of oneself to the abstract entails a surrender to the unknown – clearly Khaled is drawn to this perspective and prefers her comment to her friend’s.

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The irony of what unfolds in this desperate story is that this moment is unrecognisable to Ahlam (we are not privy to her reaction to Khaled), yet she too is performing to the expectation that he ends up having of her. Moments before Khaled is able to piece together exactly who she is, she reveals her political position, which he will fully ignores: ‘It makes me very happy to see an Algerian artist reaching such an extent of excellence and creativity . . . in fact, I don’t understand much about painting, and I rarely visit art exhibitions, but I can appreciate beautiful things. Your paintings are indeed distinctive. We need something new with a modern Algerian flavor like that’. (p. 35) Here, Ahlam discloses her aesthetic middle-ground (concealing a dearth of formal artistic appreciation but balancing it with a plea towards a vaguer notion – ‘beautiful things’). Yet what is less vague is Ahlam’s associating of art with a nationalist purpose, a new vision. Khaled remains blind to this at the start and his initial reaction to her, as well as his subsequent love for her, is based on ideals that she cannot fulfil, not so much because he is willingly forbidding her a subjectivity as because her presence cannot but be burdened with past histories and nostalgic hauntings that she wishes to escape, blind to the principles she might find there. Reminding her of her father’s sacrifices, Khaled attempts to instil pride and honour into her vision of Algeria: Carry this name of yours with great pride, but not necessarily with arrogance, and the deep awareness that you are more than just a woman. You are the consciousness of a nation. Do you understand? Symbols are not supposed to shatter. These are ignoble times. If we are not biased to values, we’ll find ourselves in the waste bag category. Don’t be biased except to principles. Don’t consider anyone but your conscience, because in the end it is the only thing that remains to live with you. (p. 236) Here, though Khaled overburdens Hayat with metaphorical and actual responsibilities beyond those which an individual can remain loyal to, he nevertheless instils a blueprint for a life lived justly and with a recognition of the sacrifices of the past. For example, on meeting each other, the question of whether to speak French or Arabic arises (‘I am the man you are meeting for the first time, and the one you are addressing the way we address strangers in French, that is in the plural form’ (p. 43)), assuring us that political and cultural choices are never far from the scene of encounters in this postcolonial setting and that the consequences of the struggles of the past are forever imprinted in decisions made in the present, even in the most miniscule details of greetings: ‘Mais comment allez-vous, mademoiselle?’ Khaled’s subsequent narration enacts the frustrations of holding onto his attempts at both viewing Ahlam erotically whilst

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simultaeously struggling against the urge to grant her a worth that connects her to his values and beliefs. Bamia proposes that ‘in its symbolic dimension, however, standing for the citizen–homeland relationship, the unrequited love is more representative of the Algerian realities’.31 Does this not tie up the loose ends too neatly though? I can see how this direction may be appealing, as it resurrects and glorifies the stranger as the national body and asks the reader to interpret the individual in this way. Ahmed’s deliberations on the dangers of investing nationalist signifiers on the bodies of strangers are illuminating: Crucially, then, the production of nations constitutes individuals as belonging to the nation: the work of ‘the nation’ is done as much through the everyday encounters in public life, as it is done through the political machinery of the nation-state. But the production of the nation also involves imagining the nation space: it involves the projection of boundaries (nationhood as cartography), and the telling of stories about the authentic landscape . . . The construction of the nation space takes place alongside the production of national character as instances in which ‘the nation’ itself is fleshed out as place and person. The nation becomes imagined as a body in which personhood and place are precariously collapsed. Through a metonymic elision, the individual can claim to embody a nation, or the nation can take the shape of the body of an individua. (p. 99, emphasis in original) This would seem to complicate Bamia’s contention that in Memory in the Flesh ‘the quarrels of the protagonist and the antagonist are not mere lovers’ fights . . . they represent two generations in conflict’.32 Reducing the complex relationship between Ahlam and Khaled to a nationalist theme evades the subtlety of Ahmed’s point. It is precisely at the point where the individual can be said to collapse into the national body that subjectivity is often produced in narratives of this sort – in the absence of any other information about Ahlam, Khaled justifies his love for her through his bestowing of nationalist signifiers. At the same time, it is the meeting with her that enables him to fully express his love for his home, mother, country. Thus, Ahlam serves no small purpose, in fact, she embodies purpose and comes to define herself against this expectation that she carry a nation’s consciousness. Contrary to the assertion that ‘what is ultimately revealed (in the sense of unveiling, exposing or baring) is simply what Khalid projects onto her – himself, his own image’33 suggests that the interaction is straightforwardly one-way. I want to propose that in fact the interpersonal dynamic is a very complex one as both Khaled and Ahlam struggle with interpretations of each other: Oh, how stupid I was, unaware that I was waking a monster that had been sleeping inside me for years. I was turning you, in my feverish insanity, into a city. You were listening to me like a pupil, absorbing my words as though we

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Both passages support an argument for the destructive qualities of the impulse to judge, quantify and determine the alterity of the other. I do not think that Khaled either devalues or mistakenly idealises Ahlam any more than she devalues and idealises him. Rather, we can reposition Khaled’s experiences and understand them as history embedded in the flesh/skin, inescapable and yet painfully visible through the presence of Ahlam. It seems to me that we need not look for the full, detailed declaration of a realistic potrait of Ahlam (whatever this may be) – McLarney charges Mosteghanemi with being ‘so preoccupied in Dhakirat al-Jasad with portraying the image of women in male writing that Ahlam is never depicted with any realism’34 – yet the search for realism in the encounter with the other overlooks the point that the lover already understands that he is negating the ‘realism’ of the other and replacing it with an ideal, at the same time as he is declaring his love for her. The inevitable destructive future of their encounter is nowhere more forcefully depicted than in Ahlam’s inability to understand Khaled’s art (though he seems to go to some length to understand hers). Here, we have a glimpse into the dangers of misapprehensions and misunderstandings that emerge at the site of the stranger. It seems to me that Khaled falls into the conscious trap of turning her into what Ahmed terms a ‘theme, concept or thing’ (p. 145), because she (in his account) says little to reveal herself otherwise. Ahlam fails to comprehend an artist’s subjective aesthetic, in particular when she comes to Khaled’s studio for the first time. Here, she emerges as a deeply disappointing character for the reader, rather than one who exceeds representation: Your eyes returned to my latest painting. You looked at it for a while and then said, ‘so this is I?’ I said, ‘It might not be you but this is the way I see you. You have some of the crooked lines of this city, the shape of its bridges, its pride, its dangers, its caves, and that river that divides its body, its femininity and secretive seduction, and its dizziness.’ You interrupted me, ‘You’re dreaming. How can you see any comparison between that bridge and me? How did that thought cross your mind? You know I only love the small wooden bridges that we see on New Year’s cards . . . but I would have preferred you to paint me and not the bridge because any woman who meets a painter has a secret dream that he will immortalize her.’ (pp. 118–19)

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Here, we witness an Ahlam who is just as willing to fix Khaled’s image of her as she is to promote it. Though Khaled takes refuge in his artistic choice (‘Was it true that there was no relationship between you and that bridge?’ (p. 119)), Ahlam falls back on cliche´ and disappointingly reveals her preference for art that she can ‘understand’, that is accessible to her. Her previous grand of gesture of ‘Je pre´fe`re l’abstrait’ reveals itself as fake, a gesture towards nothing. Unable to understand the abstract, or things that are connected but do not appear to be so (her connection with Khaled through her father, her connection with Khaled through their common home), Ahlam demands a portrait of herself that she can recognise, in one stroke eliminating the possibility that she appears to others differently to how she appears to herself. In a sense, this is a deeply conservative move, indicating that there can only be one interpretation of the self that the self can control. Bamia argues that Algeria remains at all times at the center of the action of the novel . . . the love story is nothing but an excuse and a venue for the main theme, the trial of independent Algeria by its children, those who liberated it and those who were expected to build its future. The writer is aware of the heavy political mission of her book.35 I think that the book may be signalling towards the difficulty of a love story within these constraints. I want to conclude this section by proposing a solution that does not fall either into the trap of the book as national allegory36 or into the confinement of the book as an ineffective feminist intervention into male representations of female characters (even if the purpose of this critique is to weaken male subjectivity). Rather, the unrequited love that Khaled expresses for Ahlam, though mediated through national metaphors, abounds with artistic and creative symbols. In trying to process how someone, a relative stranger with whom he shares a tenuous past, can invoke the present, past and future of an entire nation and summon his beloved city of bridges, Constantine, Khaled’s thoughts are emblematic of the trauma of his combative past and of the permanent presence of Algerian national politics in the present. He wavers between expressions of his feelings of erotic love and something else that he calls ‘madness’ (p. 117). The text does not limit itself to performing a gendered reading of generational disappointment at the result of the Algerian revolution. It also bores into the infinite metonymic routes at work in the encounters of post-revolutionary and postcolonial figures. In Memory in the Flesh, love, or being in love, opens up the possibility for a less obvious negotiation between cause and effect (Khaled is able to clearly formulate his distaste for other Algerians who he believes have betrayed the cause, though he cannot do the same with Ahlam). It seems to me that we are privy to the painful results of anti-colonial struggle, both physically (Khaled’s lost arm, Ahlam’s lost father) and psychologically. The encounter with Ahlam brings about a realisation of the disappointing vacuum between anti-colonial struggle and the postcolonial cultural understanding of

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that struggle (effaced as it is through the more current local revolutionary Algerian ideals). Khaled is painfully aware of this paradox: [I]n the first years of independence . . . soldiers were still given some respect and war handicapped were considered to be sacred among people. They inspired admiration rather than pity, and none was expected to offer any explanations or tell his story. We carried our memory in the flesh, and that didn’t need any explanation! Today, after a quarter of a century, one is ashamed of the empty sleeve hiding timidly in the pocket of a jacket, as though trying to hide one’s personal memory and apologise for the past to those with no past. (p. 48) Khaled’s involvement in anti-colonial struggle is marked on his body; a sign that vacillates between idolisation and thorough renunciation. Khaled and Khaled’s body refuse what Benita Parry, in her discussion of Simon During, has called a ‘reconciliatory’ gesture.37 Concerned over the ‘vaporising of conflict in colonial situations by those preoccupying a middle ground’, Parry rightly reminds us of the material effects of anti-colonial struggle that for Mosteghanemi, in Memory in the Flesh, take centre stage.38 Through rejecting the new cultural facilities that have sprung up in the new Algeria, financed by what he calls ‘suspicious deals and dirty commissions’ (p. 163), Khaled disavows the production of culture that ignores the sacrifices of martyrs, of men. When I characterised Memory in the Flesh as an anti-colonial novel, I intended to argue, in Parry’s words, that it is part of ‘the writings of liberation movements that had inaugurated the interrogation of colonialism and imperialism’.39 The placing of this critical move within the clutches of what Ahlam rightly says to Khaled is ‘real love’, not just ‘the stuff of stories’ (p. 245) forces the reader to face up to the intimate chaotic nature of history, the political and the personal. It is perhaps the love for Algeria, as mediated through Ahlam, that is the real love. Equally, the ‘real love’ that Ahlam gains from Khaled is a different love for a country that can never mean to her what it means to him, the unpredicatability of the other that cannot be contained (even if this other is the past itself).

Against hybridity and towards a concept of becoming: Soueif ’s In the Eye of the Sun Soueif ’s 1992 novel In the Eye of the Sun is a work of epic proportions, both in terms of the themes and issues that it aspires to address, and in the knowledge and sheer hard work that it demands of the reader.40 The novel follows the experiences of a young Egyptian woman, Asya, alongside a chronicle of modern Egypt. While politics appears to be at the forefront of the text, close reading reveals that political contexts disappear in the face of internal psychological struggles. A poignant moment towards the end of the novel reveals the extent of this:

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Asya is staring at her mother. ‘What riots, Mummy?’ Lateefa frowns at her daughter. ‘Don’t you know there have been riots in Cairo? Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you watch the news?’ Asya shakes her head. ‘Why, child, the world has been turned upside down for three days now –’ ‘But why? What about?’ ‘The government has taken away all the subsidies – or reduced them – the subsidies on essential things, of course, and – it’s particularly the bread. They doubled the price of bread and people came out into the street in a rage – how can you possibly not know?’ ‘I just didn’t,’ says Asya. ‘I haven’t been – following things – anything, really’. (p. 571) This is particularly significant to the interpretation of Soueif ’s text, as historical detail forms part of the overall narrative not only to provide context but in order to dissappear at crucial moments so as to foreground the politicisation of personal experience. Textual involvement in greater socio-historical events is marginalised when characters become embroiled in the evaluation of their personal histories. Here, historical reimagining performs a two-way function – to both instruct and to prevent the interpretation of personal narrative as exclusively a consequence of historical events. The experience of time, divided into ‘historical time’ and ‘personal time’, reveals the often futile attempts to read into fictional narrative a logical and neat sequence attributed to historical narrative. In fact, Soueif ’s deliberate foregrounding of time (some events are divided into days, hours and even minutes) shows up moments where our expectation of linearity is confounded. This disarrangement indicates the impossibility of second-guessing the intention of the author and requires very attentive reading.41 I want to suggest that Soueif proffers the nucleus of her story early on in the text in order to guide the reader through the supporting fragments and events throughout the novel. Whether this clue or guide is accepted or refused determines the degree of immersion; my sense is that it is possible to read this novel as an exploration into the performance of gender roles (i.e. not just a representation of these roles) and the awakening to those very performances through torment, though I must own up at the start that my reading is influenced by the shrewd placing of one sentence early on in the novel. Without wanting to read the characters’ actions specifically against or within a Muslim/Arab/Western paradigm, a move successfully undertaken by Joseph Massad, I do want to suggest that the novel produces an exploration of how these paradigms work as signifiers of traditionalism against a vague idea of modernity. Massad makes a similar argument when he argues that The journey of her characters is not one where liberation is the necessary telos, but rather the complex process through which the unfolding of desire(s) – sexual, social, economic, and political – is shaped by the characters themselves and all that surrounds them.42

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However, the very use of the term ‘liberation’ alerts me to the very paradigms that I will argue Soueif avoids naming. Liberation is not a category that the characters understand as lacking, and this is critical to our ability to read and engage with Soueif ’s novel as an event that wrenches one away from these expectations. In fact, what seems to have interested reviewers and critics most is precisely this road to liberation through what is viewed as Soueif ’s daring accounts of sexuality. Amin Malak, in his article ‘Arab-Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity: The Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif ’, neatly offers an interpretation that unintentionally reinvokes that which the novel seeks to move away from: Thus with Ahdaf Soueif ’s impressive achievement in In the Eye of the Sun, Muslim fiction in English and Middle-Eastern women’s writing break taboo terrain, one of those manifestations is that the female characters in her fiction often discuss, uninhibitedly and minutely, complex sexual matters among themselves.43 The notion of taboo terrain suggests exhilarating reading, and whilst I am not suggesting that the very act of writing about sexuality is not a significant and indeed important event in Arab women’s writing, I do, however, want to argue that proclaiming this in and of itself offers little more than a reactive reaction (isn’t it great that Arab women are writing about sex?). Instead, is it not what is learnt, revealed, accepted and repudiated in this frank elaboration on sexuality that should be our focus?44 Merely affirming that Arab women writers write about sexuality diverts us from the very constructedness of that sexuality that is influenced and informed by the various contexts that the characters find themselves in. Recounting her first meeting Saif Madi,45 the man whom she will fall in love with and spend the next ten years with(out) (Sunday, 6 January 1968), Asya’s narrative includes an unforgettable interjection that contaminates the remaining pages: But at not-quite-eighteen, what fantastic notions: not a world there for the taking – but worlds. Anyway – he had a great handshake. And his hands were warm in winter and cool in the summer. He was proud of that inbuilt thermosat. Just as he was proud of his perfect teeth and his smooth, muscled, brown back. ‘So what the hell did you feel when you touched the bastard? Did you run your hands over his pimply white back while he screwed you?’ His clothes were always terrific and he was thinning a bit on top but wasn’t bothered. What she will remember most vividly later is the schoolboy grin breaking through all that grown-upness. (p. 99, emphasis in the original) The italicised interjection jars with the rest of the passage and remains distinctly outside and alien to the events described (Asya does not meet Gerald, the man with whom she later has an affair, until page 479, six years after her marriage46).

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Within the lovingly depicted features of Saif, there is the haunting of a betrayal to come. But this betrayal is as yet beyond our comprehension as first-time readers and its inclusion early on in the narrative betrays an anxiety that anticipates any discussion on sexuality that has yet to appear. What can we extract from the italicised sentence? I’d like to take a moment here to discuss this turn in the text that, for the reader, must underpin all future moments in the relationship between Asya and Saif, for it is not only, as Malek and Massad determine, that the discourse on sexuality that is at stake, but the extraordinary cost of its expression. In a sense, we are destined to learn of this love story as a marred one before it has even begun. Unity, or the desire for it, is a thwarted wish in the novel, overshadowed by the ‘pimply white back’. Samia Serageldin underestimates this move when she places the affair squarely within the framework of loneliness. In speaking of the ‘isolated experience’ undergone by immigrant intellectuals, Serageldin equates this with ‘the experience of Ahdaf Soueif ’s Asya as she labours on her doctoral thesis in a remote Northern England town and is driven by sheer loneliness and boredom into the arms of an unsuitable Englishman’.47 This reductive comment cloaks the fairly palpable basis for the betrayal: Saif and Asya’s inability to overcome their sexual inhibitions, underpinned by the difficulty they both have in perceiving each other as desiring bodies. Several key moments in the novel alert us to the struggles enacted at the site of the desiring and physical body – for both Asya and Saif who reject a sexual intimacy that is never defined as such but always as something else, something social and public. Disembodiment, or a rejection of the suffering body, is the axis around which the two spin. Asya’s understanding and later reactions to sexual intimacy are informed by this process that later compels her to supplement the memory of her lover within and as part of the narrative of the beginning of her love for her husband, Saif. For Asya, as we later realise, these two narratives depend on one another as they each provide the missing part of the other. The difficulty that both Saif and Asya have in expressing their sexual needs and desires underpins much of their future actions and more or less drives the novel. On a secret trip to Beirut, where the couple hope to spend time getting to know each other, Asya’s courageous advances are thwarted by an unsure Saif. I am not certain that Saif is necessarily protective of Asya’s honour – rather, as we later learn, he seems unable to conceptualise sex with her as a desirable act. Rather, his self-fashioning as a caring, busy and responsible husband masks the need to confront his wife’s need for physical intimacy: When he has kissed her for a bit and stroked her back and rubbed her neck and undone her bra . . . Asya puts her hand on Saif ’s hair and makes her offer. ‘Darling,’ she whispers, ‘darling, you know – if you want – it’s really allright. I’m not afraid or anything.’ He lifts his head. ‘What are you talking about, Princess?’ ‘If you want to, you know, make love properly – she moves still closer to him – then it’s allright. I love you.’ ‘I love you too, Princess.’

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Contemporary Arab women writers ‘Well?’ ‘No-no.’ He looks into her eyes. ‘It wouldn’t be a good idea.’ ‘Oh! Well, OK.’ ‘See, now you’re relieved.’ ‘No . . . I’m not – at least I don’t think I am. Oh Saif, I don’t know. No, I know I’m not – ’ ‘Hush.’ He bends his head and kisses her. (p. 139)

Not able to finish her sentences, and not able to make herself understood, Asya’s words go unfinished and her desires unspoken. Equally, Saif seems to only imagine sex with Asya in violent terms, as though her attempted expression of the desire they both feel has no place in the construction of his position towards her as husband. In a later scene, when Asya once again approaches the subject, we have Saif ’s thoughts: ‘The truth is that what I wanted to do was push her down on the floor and do something violent to her. I don’t know. Hurt her’ (p. 189). In Bodies that Matter, Butler theorises a position that I find useful: Is there not a difference between a theory that asserts that, in principle, every discourse operates through exclusion and a theory that attributes to that ‘outside’ specific social and sexual positions? . . . How might such socially saturated domains of exclusion be recast from their status as ‘constitutive’ to beings who might be said to matter?48 Butler here asks how we can embrace excluded discourses that have been precariously assembled in order to contain unwanted social and sexual sites. When Asya meets a close friend of Saif ’s, she discovers that he has lied about the way he and Asya met. Rather than reveal the romantic and quaint meeting at the ‘library steps’ (p. 187), Saif pretends to have met her at an anti-government demonstration. No longer a narrative based on passion,49 theirs is a love whose beginning no longer requires a romantic overtone. I take Butler’s suggestion to mean that it is difficult for a social and sexual location to be recast by an individual who is then able to stake a claim to share in the shaping of that discourse (uncertain if indeed this claim will ever be honoured). What we have here is not simply the playing out of a patriarchal ‘reality’ that regulates and produces a desexualised femininity, but rather a confusing pattern that seemingly repeats itself throughout the many anguished scenes of Asya and Saif ’s marriage.50 Neither communicates what they want because the terminology does not make itself available. In other words, the very determining discourse that Butler directs responsibility towards is itself unpredictable and without assurance. What concerns me is the need to avoid a naive centring on what Butler, in an assessment of Zizek’s ‘use of psychoanalysis’, calls ‘the linking of political signifiers, rallying points for mobilisation and politicisation, like ‘‘women,’’ ‘‘democracy,’’ ‘‘freedom,’’ with the notion of phantasmatic investment and phanstasmatic promise’.51 In this case, yes, it is dangerous to align Asya’s actions later in the novel as

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‘liberating’, as this sits uncomplicatedly alongside notions such as Western liberalism and feminist consciousness; liberating for whom? For us the reader? Observe Asya explaining away her actions towards her husband in taking up an affair with Gerald Stone: And what am I doing? Why am I in this? I’m in this because I wanted him to stay one night. And because he made me feel physical again. And because it was a complete novelty to be with a man who wanted to talk and who – I thought – wanted to listen; someone who actually made demands on me – and not just that I should leave him alone. Someone who actually wanted me – needed to make love to me. Because he is the first man I have really slept with and I like sleeping with him. Not actually sleeping with him. Just screwing with him. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry – but what I want I really want is to occasionally do it with him, then fall asleep and wake up to find he’s not there. (p. 592) Through the use of the concept of the habitus, or immediate context, Lois McNay, in her inspiring work Gender and Agency, contributes to my understanding of how we might approach Asya’s ideological and physical quandary. I have argued elsewhere on the care required when using terms such as tradition and modernity in relation to the Arab postcolonial text.52 Here, McNay crystallises the problems with using these terms when speaking and attributing agency and responsibility to women subjects. Though her focus remains predominantly the sociological sphere, I believe there are some benefits in tracing similar patterns in fictional narrative: Against claims made in certain theories of detraditionalization, the principle of differentiation encapsulated in the concept of the field suggests that reflexive agency is not a universal feature of late-capitalist societies but rather a discontinuous phenomenon. This, in turn, offers a framework in which to understand the uneven effects of processes of gender restructuring beyond dualisms of the public versus the private or the dominant versus the excluded.53 Indeed, we cannot attribute such a direction to the novel’s protagonist, as any sense of ‘reflexive agency’ is continuously being done and undone (what we might term ‘discontinuous’), making it impossible to employ a definitive sense of telos or moving forward (towards what, one might ask). This process is encapsulated in a short exchange between Asya and her older, much-loved carer/domestic help on the issue of Saif ’s reluctance to have sex with Asya before marriage: Asya: ‘Well then what?’ Dada Zeina: ‘Well then, why doesn’t he try to do something? Mind you, I’m never saying you should let him, but why doesn’t he try?’

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Contemporary Arab women writers Asya: ‘But he does things. He does plenty. I’ve told you.’ Dada Zeina: ‘You told me he feels your breasts and kisses you.’ . . . Asya: ‘Yes. But you musn’t say it like that. You musn’t say the words’. (p. 135)

Here, Asya’s reluctance to ‘say the words’ impedes an understanding of the value of a ‘traditional’ (here located in some of the older characters) rather than bookish wisdom. Thinking she is overcoming conservatism by meeting Saif in secret, the stumbling block returns at the site of the body. Whereas Dada Zeina is clear about what shouldn’t happen, ‘I’m never saying you should let him’, she is baffled that he does not ‘try’. Asya appears accepting, or rather, even more conventional, as she hesitates to say the words. However, the temptation to consider this a struggle between liberation and religious conservatism (the public and the private, the dominant and the excluded) is misleading and ignores the further tensions at play here. I think what Soueif is attempting to discourage here is an uncomplicated association of repression with Muslim Egypt and sexual expression with Westernised Britain. The conversation above reveals a potential wisdom in traditional sources of knowledge that are articulated in order to promote a better understanding of certain situations. In other words, it is not a conservative Muslim upbringing that contributes to Saif and Asya’s problems. Rather, it is their interpretation of this conservatism (projected here as much more fierce than their elders’) that is conducive to their complexes surrounding intimacy. I find it very interesting that Dada Zeina, Asya’s carer, seems to articulate a knowledge that is unrelated to the new sources of cultural knowledge that Asya and her friends subscribe to. Where Asya does not allow herself to even articulate her desires, Dada Zeina makes it perfectly clear not only that she should be doing so, but that Saif should be articulating his. Asya’s confusion over sex and her idealisation and romanticisation of it leaves her blind to its role as a symbol of commitment. Traditional knowledge here shows up problems seemingly sidelined in hybridised and modernised individuals. When Asya reveals (through words, as she attempts to reveal her affair through silences and suggestions earlier) the details of her affair with Gerald to Saif, their conversation encapsulates much of what I have been arguing with respect to an unfinished and necessary gendering process, that highlights the dangers and complexities behind any attempts at catergorisation or claims to liberation, freedom and hybridity. Agency is difficult to position as it appears slippery here, shifting between the moving borders of a supposed normative discourse (in this case, that of heterosexual marriage). Contingencies (unforeseen or exceptional events) do not participate in the construction of norms, though they haunt the periphery of those very norms that require constant reiteration. When Asya says to her mother: ‘I have no emotional security, Mummy. I have no emotional life. Saif doesn’t want to know’ (p. 572), we are reminded of when she and Gerald have sex for the first time: ‘When Asya wakes she surprises herself. She has gone to sleep expecting to wake up to the cold finger on her heart . . . guilt, fear –

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confusion would surely coalesce into one mass . . . but there is nothing: she surprises herself by how well and peacefully she has slept. By how wide awake and full of energy she immediately feels’ (p. 540). Moreover, this energy does not appear negated by the admission to herself that she has now ‘committed adultery’ (p. 540).54 However, this force, or momentary agency, requires further testing and further negotiation – in fact, it requires a confrontation at the precise discursive and physical site on which its meaning has been constructed: heterosexual marriage. This is not to suggest that its negotiation ends there, but it does demonstrate the process of subjective agency: ‘Five years,’ he says. ‘Five years. The pain is too much for you to take . . . you sneeze if I come near you – then you go and open your legs to some fucking stranger –’ ‘This isn’t fair,’ cries Asya. ‘For years I begged you – I begged you – to make it all happen – and you wouldn’t. And I knew it was going wrong – it was all going wrong –’ ‘So you go and fuck some bastard, you actually fuck some bastard –’ ‘What did you expect, for Christ’s sake –’ cries Asya. ‘I expected my wife to be loyal. I expected my wife to have some sense of honor. I expected –’ ‘But you’ve been saying you thought something was happening – what did you think –’ ‘I thought – I thought it was some romantic hand-holding shit –’ ‘I’m twenty-six,’ Asya screams. ‘I’m not twelve. I’m twenty-six and I’ve been waiting for nine years –’ ‘You bitch,’ Saif says slowly. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you could even speak like that’. (p. 623, emphasis in the original) Soueif here demonstrates the impossibility of reconciling or arguing for a particular position when the starting point of each is so divergent. Saif, unable to deny that ‘it was all going wrong’, instead hones in on the act that refutes the expectation that he has of his wife (to be ‘loyal’, to have a ‘sense of honor’). Unwilling to contemplate what wife might actually mean to Asya, the argument quickly switches to one where other words are weighed up. When Saif says to Asya: ‘I wouldn’t have thought you could even speak like that’, we realise the enormity of what she has said: ‘I’ve been waiting for nine years.’ It is the emptiness of the nine years that Saif reads metaphorically – his response, ‘You bitch’, is clearly not as cutting as her ‘nine years’, as the nine years reflects on his idea of manliness and virility at the same time as it highlights what he has never wanted to consider: her needs. Interestingly, though Asya does not really say much, clearly the use of the word ‘waiting’ implies a longing and a desire, emotions that have not been and will never be fulfilled by Saif. Though previously Asya did not want to hear words she is now accused of using them.

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McNay, through Bourdieu, transforms how we might understand the impact of our surroundings and the cultural contexts that transform us: The idea of habitus also suggests a layer of embodied experience that is not immediately available to self-fashioning. On a pre-reflexive level, the actor is predisposed or oriented to behave in a certain way because of the ‘activepresence’ of the whole past embedded in the durable structures of the habitus . . . Thus, detraditionalizing forces may have thrown certain aspects of gender relations – the gender division of labour, marriage – up for renegotiation. At the same time, however, men and women have deepseated, often unconscious investments in conventional images of masculinity and femininty which cannot easily be reshaped and throw into doubt certain recent ideas of the transformation of intimacy. (p. 41) While the argument between Asya and Saif seems to reveal their very different subjective positions, they still seem to be caught in these conventional images of accusation and blame: honour = female; responsibility for sexual initiation = male; woman who sleeps with another man regardless of her reasons = bitch. I suppose this is the trouble with wanting to invest in the sign of the liberated woman – how is it possible when entrenched ideas surface again and again over time? McNay points to the fact that ‘in a similar vein, work on the sociology of emotions suggests that despite modernising forces, gender differences in emotional behavior are deeply entrenched’ (p. 41). This suggests that we must continue to contextualise agency even where the impulse is to bestow agency (particularly in a postcolonial text). I want to end this chapter by suggesting that within the performative constituting of gender lies an excess of contingencies not always available to analysis. Whereas Susan Muaddi Darraj, in her article ‘Narrating England and Egypt: the Hybrid Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif ’, argues that Asya moves towards an understanding of ‘gender inequities within both Western and Eastern cultures’, I want to propose that Asya moves towards an understanding of her own role in perpetuating these inequities and participating in the politicisation of sexuality through maintaining entrenched gender differences.55 In other words, habitus, even in this substantial novel, cannot fully dissolve reflexes and behavioural patterns that have sedimented and congealed over time. I am not suggesting here that we abandon the search for agency, nor that we see agency at every corner, but that we accept that agency operates within the paradigms of what some feminists might term ‘conventional images’ – images that we nevertheless need to be alert to in our reading.

6

Re-exoticising the Orient

In his article ‘Travelling Concepts: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism’, Charles Forsdick argues that: the rehabilitation of exotisme in a variety of contexts and disciplines is, in various ways, witness to the long standing French resistance to any thorough and active engagement with postcolonial thought. French versions of exoticism do not necessarily indicate an insensitivity to the condition of postcoloniality itself, but suggest instead that there is a need to open up understandings of terms used in the postcolonial context and take account of (un)translatability as these terms travel between contexts.1 A footnote to this statement reminds us that the key theoretical players in postcolonial studies, Said, Spivak and Bhabha remain relatively unavailable in translation in France.2 This set me thinking about ways in which we might productively approach the treatment of certain ‘orientalist’ features found in the work of Francophone Arab women writers beyond a tried and tested postcolonial framework. It is possible that the practice of exotisme or exoticism, finds its way into the representation of current forms of identity and becomes, in the hands of contemporary writers, a form of exploration, not into their past in search of a heritage, as I explain below, but into art and aesthetics. Here, I want to look at specific moments in the novels Women of Algiers in their Apartment by Assia Djebar and the first novel in the Sherazade trilogy, Sherazade, by Leila Sebbar3 in order to acertain the level of interpretation and association with the prominency and legitimacy of exotisme as an interpretive framework. I will argue for the possibility that women writers use the legacy of exotisme in order to interrogate the discourse from within, whilst at the same time immersing themselves in it. The novels will be also be examined in light of what they have to offer an expanding Arab women’s literature in terms of historical revisionism and direct political intervention, and, most significantly, what they tell us about the internalisation of a colonialist legacy that sometimes appears etched in the unconscious of the text.

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A phantom heritage4 In his article ‘Specters of Orientalism in France, Algeria and Postcolonial Studies’, Michael O’Riley discusses the possibility that certain trends within postcolonial studies often leave themselves open to allegations of ‘collaborating’ with colonialism’s past. Here, O’Riley is referring to what he terms a ‘fixed’ point of reference that postcolonial studies, or postcolonialism, requires in order to mount any significant counter-arguments. O’Riley points to the fact that: As a driving discourse of colonial culture, orientalism, too, remains a fixed point of reference in postcolonial criticism, reappearing in the form of past images and fantasies to haunt the contemporary cultural scene.5 This formulation of orientalism as a ‘driving discourse’ in the ‘discourse of colonial culture’, as well as its positioning as a necessity for postcolonial criticism, further complicates a more traditional, linear approach where postcolonial criticism appears always to counter the project of orientalism (or at least, the project as described in Edward Said’s Orientalism). Nevertheless, what O’Riley suggests here is that there is an inevitable return to orientalism as a practice in postcolonial studies, and this return can often function as a temporary resurrection of the principles of orientalism. This sets in motion the compelling possibility that orientalism not only functions to provide a convenient narrative against which postcolonial criticism can act, but, more interestingly, in its invocation, continues to reproduce its primary function, to create a particular type of knowledge about the ‘Orient’.6 In other words, through re-emphasising the centrality of orientalism, postcolonialism gives a voice to orientalist paradigms. What O’Riley is suggesting here, particularly in the case of Franco-Algerian relations, is that: The motif of haunting and spectrality evoked here is particularly relevant to contemporary notions of postcolonial and Franco-Algerian cultural relations because the invisible yet perceived persistence of a colonial past and desire linked to orientalist practice continues to condition both postcolonial and Franco-Algerian relations as well as critical responses to them.7 O’Riley here points to the overwhelming presence of orientalist practice in French cultural production. Postcolonial studies, in seeking to expose this practice, would seem to be operating on the understanding that experiences in time (repressed histories of colonialism) are always retrievable, reparable and comprehensible. Thus, postcolonial studies is involved not only in understanding the colonial past but in actively informing a postcolonial consciousness (an altogether very different move). This latter move can be viewed as broadly political and it is an issue that the novels under discussion seem to be in dialogue with. Contemporary Arab women writers writing in France, seeking to perhaps revisit or represent their ‘orientalist heritage’ come up against a significant obstacle: they

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are revisiting a heritage that they cannot always recuperate, in the way that has become standardised through postcolonial criticism. The orientalist legacy as understood by postcolonial theory is one that has consistently misrepresented the Orient and one that has, in many ways, persisted in misrepresenting or ignoring Said’s formulation of the Orient (orientalism is therefore not yet a thing of the past). My surprise at locating an engagement with orientalist motifs in the fiction forces me to engage with the experience of coming face to face with orientalist practice. In other words, I find it highly significant that writers engaged in writing literature and popular fiction return to identifiably orientalist means of representation and treat them with a certain exotic fascination. O’Riley, in his examination of Algerian postcolonial novelists, asks what the ‘ramifications involved in a postcolonial consciousness [are] of remembering the orientalist paradigm within the contemporary postcolonial period’. This is an important step, as it suggests that a return to the representations of and engagement with orientalist practice carries with it a responsibility or ethical consideration. Concerned over postcolonial attempts to readdress the ‘ills’ of colonialism and orientalism, O’Riley criticises Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem for ‘undertak[ing] an interventionist critique of colonial exoticist discourse that remains haunted by the colonial process of orientalizing, gendering, and exoticizing the Algerian body/national body’.8 Although this image of a ‘haunting’ is quite powerful, it inherently contains the suggestion of a latent or unconscious slipping into discourse; that somehow the writers under question are powerless to change the trajectory of their writing within the ‘postcolonial period’ and are somehow unconsciously drawn to revisit the past. With reference to Alloula’s influential study, O’Riley is pointing to and questioning the political efficacy of a book that, though it claims to be returning the orientalist postcards to the imperial centre, risks (or has already risked) reproducing the machinery of a marketable sexuality through the very production of the book The Colonial Harem. This sets up a difficult situation for those writers who seek to negotiate the colonial site against a postcolonial obligation. What I want to argue here is that the frequency of orientalist imagery within contemporary fiction alerts us to the possibility that this haunting is not only deliberate but functions to indeed posit a new direction in postcolonial theory that recognises and integrates a colonial legacy, not without its problems. In other words, it becomes possible to argue for an engagement with colonial and orientalist practice that compels a theorisation of encounters, of how discourses and subject meet across time and space (broadly speaking such texts reproduce some of the inherently problematic paradigms of ‘othering’). Extending his argument, O’Riley considers theorist Anne McClintock’s well-known work Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest and Robert Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. Here O’Riley concludes that ‘while these works do not purposely reinscribe the orientalist intent of the colonial gaze, they do point to a paradox of postcolonial studies informed by the iterative, haunting structure of orientalism itself ’.9 I think what O’Riley is suggesting here is that behind many influential studies on colonialism and orientalism is a fascination with orientalism, be it

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academic, aesthetic, erotic, etc. This fascination returns in its alternative format – as a subject of critique. Clearly, the problem here is that we risk emptying postcolonial discourse of its political power to construct a reassessment of the consequences of colonialism and orientalist practice. At the same time, we open up a new direction for postcolonial studies where the efficacy of orientalism’s production of scenes of desire for consumption is openly discussed for what it might offer a writer or critic seeking to understand and participate in this discourse. In this case, a ‘nineteenth-century orientalist idiom’ becomes an unexpected tool. Rather than view the works of contemporary Arab women writers as either failing or succeeding to engage in ‘an oppositional postcolonial practice’, it will be possible to evaluate them against the situations that they mimic or resuscitate in order to ascertain the aesthetic, social and psychological profit to be gained.10 Of course, at the same time, it is essential to address the position of the reader/critic who is offered this orientalist discourse for consumption (I hesitate to call this ‘imperialist nostalgia’, but I will return to this),11 divorced from the critical idiom that has now come to surround the colonial literary and historical bequest. Rather than simply invoke, enliven and reinstate the power of orientalist imagery and its potential to dehumanise and essentialise the objects of its inquiry, the works that I look at exoticise this discourse in order to mount distinct and discrete enquiries that pertain to the representation of women in the societies under question. How they negotiate the legacy of orientalist discourse is wide ranging in its potential. In a sense, this chapter sets out to critique the exoticisation of colonial and orientalist practice by Francophone Arab women writers whilst, more importantly, ‘demonstrat[ing] the relevance of [this] critique of the orientalist fantasy to contemporary postcolonial conditions’.12 The attempt to understand the allure of a postcolonial orientalism for contemporary writers may have much to do with the process of exoticisation that I shall discuss below. Exoticisation, as a very separate practice to orientalism, provides the means through which orientalism becomes interesting again as a practice, a practice that clearly remains intriguing and necessarily productive for Djebar and Sebbar.13 Charles Forsdick, in his work Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures, theorises current usages of ‘exoticism’ and, through a discussion of its use in French cultural and literary studies, astutely differentiates its potential from its doubtful associations in postcolonial studies: [A]mong postcolonial critics in particular, exoticism is customarily dismissed as an outmoded, essentializing, and objectifying process, as if this pejorative understanding of the word reflected a widespread orthodoxy unworthy of further exploration. (p. 28) Nevertheless, Forsdick argues, it has been possible, in Francophone literary studies, to recuperate the term as standing in, semantically, for the experience of diversity.14 I have found this recuperation very useful for thinking of ways in

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which women writers have returned to confront orientalist imagery that is part of their cultural past through reproducing an imaginary contact with it. Part of the answer to why this may be effective lies precisely somewhere between the two definitions of exoticism itself: Since exotisme (and its English equivalent ‘exoticism’) were coined in the first half of the nineteenth century, the term has been subject to steady semantic shifts between two poles, one signifying an exotic-ness essential to radical otherness, the other describing the process whereby such radical otherness is either experienced by a traveller from outside or translated, transported, represented for consumption at home. (p. 32, first emphasis in the original, subsequently my emphases) In a sense, returning to the site of orientalist discourse and practice, taking up the challenge and re-exoticising them, enables the writers that I will discuss here both to participate in the creation of radical otherness and to deconstruct how they themselves have come to be represented through this process. I think that the looking back process is always accompanied by a determining factor, in other words, we are always looking for something rather than anything. The question here is, how do we look back? Where an exploration and unveiling of the construction and perpetuation of orientalist practice was the central focus for Said in Orientalism, here, exoticising or reviving the exotic within orientalist representation (in a sense, giving it life again) ultimately allows for a productive revisioning process (what Forsdick calls a ‘rehabilitation of exotisme’, p. 34, emphasis in original). Though here exoticism ‘provides a much more versatile means of understanding intercultural contact and the mutual implications of the interaction of cultures’, I want to suggest that it can be a powerful, conscious tool for reviewing contact across time and space. Writing on the genre of the exotic novel, Peter Dunwoodie, in his work Writing French Algeria, explains that: the exotic novel is, rather, the pretext for lengthy explorations of the two mutually dependent factors which constitute exotic writing in general, namely extensive reworking of stereotypical motifs evoking foreign locations and, in the best tradition of Romanticism, equally extensive exploration of the feelings, emotions, and memories they supposedly generate in the spectator.15 Thus, the nineteenth-century exotic novel serves another purpose that is somehow distinct from its function as producer of stereotypical motifs. It appears to allow for the space for an introspective look at emotions, memories, and, as I will argue later, much more. In the novels that I consider, I found a rather ambivalent relationship towards orientalist practice. Forsdick’s assertion that ‘the exotic is located at a distance not only in terms of space but also of time’16 and Dunwoodie’s argument for exoticism as that which ‘resides in the subject looking, not in the object looked at’17 helped me conclude that exoticism, as an energising discursive practice, though its origins may reside in a particular time

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(the early nineteenth century), may be recuperated as a consciously desirable one, even when the risks are evident. Specifically, I suggest, Djebar and Sebbar knowingly re-exoticise the Orient and orientalist practice as a way of entering into a dialogue with the past (or, more accurately, representations of the past). Though for anti-colonial thinkers such as Fanon, Forsdick writes, ‘exoticism is seen as a means of simplifying, objectifying, neutralizing and ultimately mummifying the colonized culture’18 I found that, when re-exoticised textually, orientalist practice is understood as an ambivalent (rather than mummified) process through which otherness is experienced and alterity is produced. It is possible that, through the re-exoticisation of certain orientalist practices, Arab women writers represent their own experience of diversity in the viewing and revisiting of the multiple representations of what they have been told constitutes their heritage. The suggestion that orientalist practices such as art (which is here my focus) function as a stable signifier of a humiliating and objectifying past does not hold up. What we risk ignoring here is a field of signification not readily available to the viewer today but that would have been available to the discerning viewer in the nineteenth century. To reduce orientalist practice and the exoticisation of those practices that informed their reception to an indicator of a degrading heritage undermines both the conditions of production of that practice and the complex negotaitons involved in its viewing. Objectification can, and for Djebar and Sebbar does, become a means through which subjectification is understood. Forsdick argues for the centrality or persistence of exoticism and persuades us that ‘exoticism is not – or not exclusively – an adjunct of colonial discourse whose late twentieth-century re-emergence merely reflects the persistent workings of ‘‘imperialist nostalgia’’’.19 Though it seems to me that some of the works, for example Anglophone Arab women writer Ahdaf Soueif ’s The Map of Love, gesture towards imperialist nostalgia, these gestures might be better understood as a recuperation of colonial discourse.20 Exoticism, as a conscious process, can be understood as an active, energetic move towards making sense of diversity. It is perhaps no accident that this process is actively engaged with in the works two Francophone writers, Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar. Though Ahdaf Soueif also appears to be involved in similar gestures, as I have argued elsewhere, this involvement seems to participate in a move that is in opposition to orientalism and by association hostile to the process of exoticism.21 Exoticism, Forsdick concludes: is part of a subtle imbrication with a range of concepts central to postcolonial thought, concepts whose ongoing re-definition in the theories and practices of postcolonial literature and culture bears witness to the fundamentally unfinished nature of postcolonialism itself.22 Postcolonialism in Djebar and Sebbar is an unfinished business. Exoticism, as a concept best understood as informing or providing a framework within which to understand orientalist practice, is here both critiqued and appreciated. I will argue that, in many ways, the articulation of the exotic can also prove to be a

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productive mode of resistance.23 In relation to Assia Djebar’s critical assertions, O’Riley argues that : For Djebar, a ‘post-orientalist’ aesthetics enables the body captured by the orientalist gaze of the past to return as a liberated, yet ghostly, figure from the colonial era. Indeed, Djebar, Fanon and Alloula equate a postcolonial discursive practice with a slow exhumation of the sexualized and orientalized body of colonial history. Yet, the liberatory performance designed to articulate the postcolonial moment conflates the traces of the orientalized body with the discursive traces of a colonial past now dissolved, even if manifested in radically new forms.24 O’Riley here points to the dangers that I have hitherto resisted discussing. Indeed, what cannot be overlooked in my positive recuperatory model is that revisiting the site of colonial practice through the prism of exotisme cannot but reanimate what in postcolonial studies are considered to be obsolete paradigms. My only temporary way out of this are to suggest that exotisme or exoticisation is a process, in authorship, undergone consciously and for a particular narrative effect. In fact, in his work on representations of the exotic, Peter Mason argues that: The exotic . . . is not something that exists prior to its ‘discovery.’ It is the very act of discovery which produces the exotic as such, and it produces it in varying degrees of wildness or domestication. In other words, the exotic is the product of the process of exoticization . . . [The] object of study is a representational effect, produced and reproduced in a process which has not stopped at the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism.25 Mason’s proposition is particularly interesting, as it implies that, on some level, the production of the exotic, through exoticisation, is a choice that determnines how the object of study will be represented. Specifically, I want to argue that Djebar and Sebbar’s choice to re-exoticise orientalist art allows them to participate in the production of colonial discourse (something geographically and spatially normally out of bounds for them). This is much more than just a recuperating gesture; it functions on the level of what Forsdick has called resistance, resistance to the prevailing understanding of how Arab women should negotiate orientalist practice: However, acceptance of the complexity of the term and of the processes it describes reflects a postcolonial shift, an acknowledgment that there is a need to qualify and refine our understanding of otherness, to accept that the epithet ‘exotic’ can operate as a shifter, and even that exoticism itself as a form of radical otherness can accordingly function, in phenomena such as cultural opacity, transculturation, and contrapuntal approaches to interculturality, as a mode of resistance.26

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Participating in the process of exoticisation allows for an interrogation into how orientalism came to have the overwhelming power of description and knowledge about the Orient. I am primarily interested in the orientalist practice of art, specifically the representation of odalisques and harem scenes.27 Sebbar and Djebar are involved in producing and revealing (it is this process that I view as re-exoticisation) these tropes or objects as sites of intervention – where Arab women writers participate in a recovery of the site of their discursive production. Said writes in Orientalism that ‘the modern Orientalist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished’.28 Though I would not go so far as calling the writers neo-orientalists they do seem to be on a heroic endeavour of sorts; re-examining, re-evaluating and rescuing orientalist preoccupations and imaginations only to overturn and complicate them anew.

Popular revisions: harems and more harems I here want to briefly acknowledge the popularity of novels that unquestioningly immerse themselves in the more prominent features of orientalism. Most popular novels that take orientalist discourses at face value provide a heady mixture of uncomplicated ‘exotic’ allure and intrigue and participate in Graham Huggan’s more pessimistic view of exoticism’s allure in the market-place.29 For Alev Croutier (author of The Palace of Tears and Leyla: The Black Tulip) and Dora Levy Mossanen (author of Harem) the exotic is something fixed and there for the taking, rather than a discursive construct or effect. Orientalist themes and ‘exotic’ landscapes are used to maximum extravagant effect. Though they are not quite marketed as romance novels, these works of fiction use the well-known tropes of orientalist fantasy and seduction in order to narrate oriental tales of women in need of rescue from malicious despots. Both Mossanen and Croutier write in English. Mossanen, an author of Iranian and Israeli descent, now lives in the US, as does Croutier, who is of Turkish descent. Alev Croutier is the more prolific of the two, having written a well-known book on the Turkish seraglio entitled Harem: The World behind the Veil, a source book used and acknowledged by Mossanen. Both of these novelists approach their subject matter seemingly unproblemtically and without any self-conscious reflection. Unlike the novels by Sebbar and Djebar, Croutier and Mossanen seem to be fully at ease with their reproduction of the harem tales and rescue fantasies, incense and eunuchs; a representation that would invariably prove tricky for any positive or recuperative postcolonial reading. The Palace of Tears, Leyla and Harem visibly and unapologetically participate in the feminisation of the Orient as desirable and mysterious. In fact, these qualities form the foreground of the novels that appear to constitute a proto-Saidean phase where they invoke an orientalist aesthetic for consumption (albeit overturning the traditional orientalist tale by promoting heroines rather than heroes). Specifically, these novels consciously and unapologetically source orintalist practices, both real and imagined, for intriguing and

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exhilarating plots, whereas Djebar and Sebbar, though they tackle the same scene of orientalist intrigue, do so in the midst of an ambiguous and highly politicised context. A brief look at Harem, Leyla and The Palace of Tears and the ways in which they engage with orientalism and orientalist practice will provide us with a platform from which we can inquire into the more ambiguous use of this method by Djebar and Sebbar. Alev Croutier’s books The Palace of Tears (2000) and Leyla (2003) are stories set during the years of the Ottoman Empire. Leyla, a book published under the Girls of Many Lands educational series in the US, seeks to present the life of a young Turkish girl living in the harem of Sultan Ahmet III. The book ends with a final section entitled ‘Then and Now: A Girl’s Life’, where an uncomplicated, a-historical link is made with the girl in the book and young girls living in Turkey today. This section provides a history of women in Turkey, starting with narrative of the harems in the Ottoman Empire, through to a potted history of harems, finally making its way towards an unproblematic jump forward to modern Turkey, where we are gratified to learn that ‘girls and women in Turkey today have a variety of choices’.30 The story itself is of a young girl who sells herself to slave merchants in order to save her mother and siblings from destitution and hunger. With her father missing, Leyla feels compelled to sacrifice herself for their well-being. Once in the sultan’s palace, Leyla has the opportunity to cultivate the famous black tulip. Although in the end Leyla miraculously finds her long-lost father, he is granted permission to return to his family while she is not. As she tells us throughout the book, the rest is up to ‘kismet’. The novel presents no self-reflexive understanding of the discourse surrounding the project of Orientalism. All the events are uncomplicated and all of the scenarios that we encounter are presented as natural and organic to a particular orientalist aesthetic. Although The Palace of Tears makes some attempt to discuss Turcomania in the Paris of the nineteenth century, the narrative falls prey to this Turcomania. Harem revels in all of the fictive depicitions of harem life as restrictive, erotic and hedonistic. As Mossanen herself tells us, ‘I found myself lost in these women’s tormented world of smoke, opium and poisons.’31 What I found most interesting about these novels, however, is the manner of their production. The covers of Harem and The Palace of Tears each use the portrait of a languishing odalisque32 and they each make a good example of oriental paraphernalia themselves, in particular The Palace of Tears, which is produced in pocket-sized format. Critically, what is intriguing about these works is the ease with which they are able to reiterate certain terms of reference, and the unease with which a postcolonial critic may read them! In The Palace of Tears, the story of a man desperately in love with the picture of a woman whom he believes will be his salvation is here described as a painting: ‘How delightful!’ one of the French ladies whispered to another. ‘Look, how exotic her dress is!’ ‘Doesn’t she remind you of Monsieur Ingres’s odalisque?’33

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Croutier here places her story squarely within the framework of a seductive and alluring Orient: The year was 1868. Europe was in a frenzy, seeking its spiritual opposite in the recesses of the Maghreb and the Levant. An obsession for Orientalism permeated everything, from pulp fiction and fashion to the grand canvases of Delacroix.34 A willingness to participate in this ‘frenzy’ of orientalism unsurprisingly produces a story that is steeped in orientalist imagery. In Harem, discourses range from the tempting and alluring to the mundane and domestic. What is significant, though, is the extent to which the more ‘realistic’ views of the functioning of a domestic harem are sacrificed in favour of the more enticing and erotically revealing accounts. Viewed from a postcolonial, post-orientalist perspective, it is easy enough to dismiss these accounts for their tireless perpetuation of a knowable and exoticised orient. The choices that these writers make are intriguing in that they attempt to reproduce an essence of the harem and the Orient. The orientalist practices evoked in these texts seem to function only on the level of immediate gratification; orientalist imagery is there for a fulfilment of the senses and exoticism functions to replace the need of understanding diversity. Below I shall argue that it is possible to engage in the re-exoticisation of orientalist discourse without fully giving into its reductive powers. Nevertheless, I do want to point to the popularity of the above novels, alerting us to the ongoing fascination with the exotic Orient that produces opposites; a diversity and experience of otherness that is recreated for the taking.

Exoticism? ‘The feeling which Diversity stirs in us’: Djebar’s ‘Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound’ in Women of Algiers in their Apartment and Sebbar’s Sherazade35 Leila Sebbar and Assia Djebar re-exoticise orientalist imagery to great effect in their novels. The process that they depict, though not always ‘subversive’ nor easily explained, is, however, complicated through narrative structure, the overall aims of the novels, character development as well as complex engagement and dialogue with the ongoing influence of an orientalist legacy. Whilst it is easier to dismiss the novels of Croutier and Mossanen as self-consciously choosing to develop this orientalist legacy for their inherent promotion of the Orient as a place of intrigue and mystique, it is not as easy to place or assign a tame rationale to the orientalist practices that Sebbar and Djebar engage with. Rather, it is necessary to view their move as one that fulfils certain needs or requirements within contemporary Arab women’s writing that seeks to tackle not only its representation of the present but its representation and understanding, in particular in French culture, of the prominent orientalist past. One might initially ask why the need to revisit sites produced and upheld by the orientalist imagination? As we have seen in the previous chapters, many Arab

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women writers have avoided coming directly into contact with this aesthetic, preferring not to counter it in their fiction and relying instead on current overtly political and social concerns to feed into their writing. However, it is equally possible to argue that a dialogue with misrepresentation (that offered by the discourse of orientalism) requires boldly taking up the tools of that misrepresentation and understanding the necessary components of its production. This process can sometimes lead to surprising conclusions. In Djebar’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment and Sebbar’s Sherazade orientalist art is an object of scrutiny. Whilst Djebar explores crucial issues surrounding Algerian history and self-representation in fragments of conversations and stories, the section entitled ‘Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound’ focuses on the reenactment of Delacroix’s arrival on Algerian shores. The narrator, in an intrusive and assertive way, seems to want the reader to come and take a look behind Delacroix’s famous painting. Politically, one might want to ask, what form would this look take, and what would we see? Ostensibly, we see what the narrator allows us to see, and, more importantly, we reinterpret the painting based on the frame that we are provided with (Djebar, the Algerian author, invites us to read between the lines of the painting). In and of itself, one could argue that this is an important act, retelling the conditions of production. Specifically, Belinda Jack writes that ‘Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement counters the multiple appropriating gestures of Euge`ne Delacroix’s famous, and perhaps emblematic painting of the same name, by appropriating its title and starting afresh.’ Jack goes on to argue that: For a long time, within Western cultural forms (and to a large extent within Arabic cultural forms), men had a monopoly on the representation of North African women. Delacroix painted what he saw, and that representation, along with other comparable representations, was the ‘truth’ about North African women. Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger invites (re-)consideration of Delacroix’s regard vole´ and the validity of the representation which resulted. Does the viewer of the painting see with the painter’s eyes or can we look and see something different and more complex?36 I am not certain that we can take this presumption wholly at face value. To assert that Delacroix’s paintings ‘along with other comparable representations’ constitute a knowledge about North African women surely reduces the representational quality of the art. When Djebar encounters and engages with Delacroix, we must assume, or at least Djebar enacts the assumption, that she is engaging with Delacroix at the level of artistic representation. I do not think that the validity of that representation is what is at stake here (this can be simply rejected), rather, the very existence of that representation alerts us to the fact that Delacroix was painting within a well-established genre and within an orientalist aesthetic that preceded him and to which he contributed. In other words, I do not think that Djebar’s intervention stops with her feminisation of Delacroix’s roaming eye through penetrating the surface of the painting or

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through telling the story of those painted, or even, of legitimating the women of the painting as ancestors of modern Algerian women. Djebar’s act of writing on and of the painting may fulfil a particular postcolonial requisitioning of the past; however, it is the existence of the painting and how it came into being that exceeds this appropriation. Djebar writes that ‘Delacroix’s painting has been perceived as one approach to a feminine version of the Orient – undoubtedly the first one in European painting, which usually treated the theme of the odalisque as literature or evoked only the cruelty and the nudity of the seraglio’ (p. 137, my emphasis).37 Here Djebar suggests that she is aware of the fact that this interpretation is only one among many others (and, by implication, that her interpretation is one among others): Penciled bodies coming out of the anonymity of exoticism . . . Upon his return to Paris, the painter will work for two years on the image of a memory that teeters with a muted and unformulated uncertainty, although well-documented and supported by authentic objects. What he comes out with is a masterpiece that still stirs questions deep within us. (p. 135, my emphasis) As with Sebbar, Djebar’s use of the word ‘masterpiece’ here indicates an association with artistic standards – standards whose parameters are not wholly clear, but that here seem to induce strong emotions. As Djebar describes the painting, she effectively interprets and exoticises it for us, leading the way to how she imagines Delacroix to have understood the scene: ‘The whole meaning of the painting is played out in the relationship these three have with their bodies, as well as with the place of their enclosure. Resigned prisoners in a closed place’ (p. 136). In effect, Djebar produces a narrative of sequestration and claustrophobia, indicators which are not available to us through the painting itself, but rather, through the index of meaning generated by orientalist discourse; in other words, she seems to be exoticising the paintings through an interpretation that is particular to her as a writer attempting to retrieve Arab women’s voices and histories. Significantly, Djebar imagines Delacroix’s drawing ‘coming out of the anonymity of exoticism’ and, significantly, entering an exoticism identified and made intelligible by her. For Djebar, Delacroix, far from painting in order to reproduce truisms associated with North African women, is interpreted as attempting empathy or even gentleness towards his subject. Djebar here seems to be suggesting that Delacroix be admired for allowing the representation of ‘sensuality’ and ‘softness’ to be observed by those whom the painting represents, the ‘we’ referred to by Djebar. In accepting its fascination, Djebar admits that this is ‘not actually because it suggests that superficial Orient . . . but because, by placing us in the position of onlookers in front of these women, it reminds us that ordinarily we have no right to be there’ (p. 137). Several subjective positions are being created here (and indeed throughout the collection of narratives that make up Women of Algiers in their Apartment). On the one hand Djebar attempts to look at the painting through the eyes of

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Delacroix; we the readers subsequently are invited to look into this hothouse (to verify its in/authenticity or just to whet our appetite?). Djebar, however, lays claim to this viewing as it allows the ‘we’ to whom she refers to experience the ‘stolen glance’ ordinarily forbidden, the glance at sensuality. Peculiarly, the glance that is forbidden to the women in the painting is that afforded to the painter (who paints one of them looking directly at him). Djebar transforms this look, not unproblematically, into one that allows her to experience all illicit looks (a return of the gaze we might say). Jane Hiddlestone elaborates on Djebar’s feminist impulse in her reading of the discussion on Delacroix: Despite the possible violence of Delacroix’s wilful incursion into the women’s segregated space, however, and despite his embellishment or appropriation of their experience, Djebar at the same time examines the painting precisely because it raises the same questions regarding representation and singularity that her own work addresses . . . this description of the painting reinforces the sense that the Algerian women of both Delacroix and Djebar’s work resist determination and knowledge.38 Hiddlestone here confirms Djebar’s position as a responsible writer who learns from Delacroix not to repeat the same mistakes of singular, monolithic representation. However, whereas Djebar is able to exert control over her own creations, she must admit to herself that when it comes to controlling the multiple interpretations of the paintings she is in fact pointing towards the impossibility of controlling the interpretation of her creations. In attempting to recreate Delacroix’s site of production with much imagination and tenderness, Djebar submits to the process of exoticism that allows her to view the painting as other than a paradigm of power relations. Susan Gauch, in her recent work on North African literature and film, recuperates Djebar’s fascination with Delacroix. For Djebar, Gauch argues: [Delacroix’s] Femmes d’Alger opposes some resistance to their [the women’s] objectification because of the way they occupy their bodies and their apartments in seeming indifference to their painter’s presence . . . these Algerian women do not present themselves to viewers but exist elsewhere for themselves and one another. The painting thus offers Djebar, an Algerian woman writing in French over 150 years after its completion, a fleeting look at a community of women embodied through a dialogue among themselves.39 Gauch appears to suggest that Delacroix’s figures represent some form of reality that stands in for a history for contemporary Algerian women. Djebar, however, makes Delacroix’s context very clear (the dreamy quality of his visit, the immersion into an orientalist aesthetic, his sketches of the women and the objects he takes back with him to France so that he can mimic authenticity) and that context, one of intrigue and double-dealing (to assure his entry into the

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harem), forms the background of his art. The women in the painting may seem indifferent, but as they are a product of Delacroix’s hand, he is responsible for this indifference. My point here is that the scene is depicted with particular indexes of interpretation in mind, an argument put forward by Inge Boer in her work Disorienting Vision: Rereading Stereotypes in French Orientalist Texts and Images. Boer’s work has helped me clarify some loose ends as regards the complex viewing process negotiated in the consumption of orientalist art.40 Boer argues that orientalist art ‘enact[s] the fantasy of intruding upon feminine space coded as ‘‘other’’, that is as racially and culturally different – an otherness whose central knot is sexuality’ (p. 93). Nevertheless, the Orient depicted in orientalist art need not always occupy a fixed geographical position (a location). Rather, it could be seen as more ‘mobile’ (p. 76). Boer here crucially asks how Delacroix’s painting comes to ‘establish the Orient as the realm of cultural, racial and sexual ‘‘otherness’’ or difference?’ (p. 77). In other words, what makes the painting orientalist? Boer claims that it is not enough to claim that it contain an ‘‘‘effet de re´el’’’. Rather than reiterate its effect, this effect itself deserves critical attention (p. 77). Boer’s desire to draw out these representational qualities alerts us to the dangers of what is at stake if we do not. The effect of consuming orientalist art does not provide an uncomplicated gateway into a forgotten past. Rather, the very consumption of the paintings prompts an exoticisation process at the scene that is at the mercy of what signifiers take precedence. For example, what Djebar sees in the painting points to the betrayal of what she does not see (exoticisation in processes, or, the ‘feeling which Diversity stirs in us’): The distant and familiar dream in the faraway eyes of the three Algerian women, if we make an attempt to grasp its nature, makes us in turn dream of sensuality: a nostalgia or vague softness, triggered by their so obvious absence. As if behind those bodies, and before the servant lets the curtain fall once more, a universe is displayed in which they might still live continuously, before they take their pose in front of us, who look on. (p. 137) Yet what makes this universe so effective in the form of the painting? Regarding certain orientalist artistic depictions of the harem, argues Boer, ‘how we ‘‘know’’ that their subject matter is the Orient is itself part of what requires critical analysis’ (p. 78). The painting makes ‘use of epistemological categories connected to a conventional repertory, and here, to iconographic indicators’ (p. 78). It seems to me that Djebar explores specific iconographic indicators of her own choosing, such as the direction of the eyes, the women’s bodies, the curtain, that together create a particular narrative about the painting. In her essay ‘What Happened to Global Sisterhood? Writing and Reading ‘‘the’’ Postcolonial Woman’, Denise deCaires Narain comments insightfully on Djebar’s project:

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[Djebar’s] story works to deconstruct the passivity and stasis of Delacroix’s painting but Djebar’s narrative strategy is one which suggests, in its emphasis on translation, listening, singing, conversation and constantly shifting narrative perspective, that there is no definitive representation of Algerian women that can replace Delacroix’s Orientalist image.41 This irreplaceability of Delacroix’s original indicates its actual disconnectedness from the Algerian women of the present. It is not that they only act as a passive and silent past, a past that is not actually accessible as a truth, but only as an aesthetic, with its own rules of form. The return to Delacroix and orientalist art, though it may have received some negative interpretations,42 is not an unimportant event or sleight of hand. Sebbar and Djebar, though very differently, explore this terrain seriously. These authors appear to want to enter the discourse of orientalism and to experience it as a site of diversity, in other words, to exoticise it for themselves; not necessarily to recoup the orientalist perspective but to discover it anew, to understand its fascination afresh. In many ways, Delacroix’s observation cannot but be what it is, for he had no other access to the women of the harem – in a sense, neither does Djebar apart from his painting (the closest thing to a record of harem life).43 I want to take a moment here to explore Leila Sebbar’s dialogue with orientalist art, elaborating further on Boer’s notions of iconographic indicators in art. In Leila Sebbar’s Sherazade, the young French-Algerian girl enacts the inbetweeness articulated in Djebar’s interraction with Delacroix. Djebar’s and Sebbar’s treatment of this theme are very different and this in itself is significant to an understanding of the function of re-exoticisation. Sherazade tells the story of a young Algerian girl living in Paris who runs away from her family to live in a squat. At the very start of the novel, she meets a young man named Julien whose first words to her are: ‘You think you can be called Sherazade, just like that?’44 Where Gauch argues that ‘Julien’s Orientalist references clash with the setting of the fast-food restaurant in this conversation with Sherazade; globalized youth culture and Orientalist ‘‘high’’ culture confront each other’,45 I argue for the possibility that the orientalist perspective foregrounds and even precedes this meeting between a French boy and an Algerian girl. Julien is not able, in this initial conversation, to distance himself from making orientalist associations and, a couple of sentences into the conversation, he references author of exotic adventure stories Pierre Loti, placing us squarely within the confines of an orientalist discourse. Julien’s interest in Fromentin (another author of exotic adventure stories) and Delacroix often makes for uncomfortable reading as these allusions encourage the reader to participate in the perpetuation of orientalist practices. O’Riley here points towards this problem: As a reserve of sedimented images and representations, orientalism presents an idiom that, even when evoked in critical terms, conjures the static and immobile Orient, a ghostly figure of colonial temporality that becomes

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In Sherazade, Sebbar shrewdly pits Sherazade’s experience of orientalism against Julien’s. Whereas his understanding of orientalism does seem to be ‘static’ and ‘immobile’, asserted a-historically in his comparisons of them to Sherazade, Sherazade learns the diverse possible meanings of orientalism through sheer hard work and an exoticisation process that is as much about refuting Julien’s vision as it is about understanding her position in relation to this discourse. I do not think that Sherazade simply sheds her orientalist past and moves on to new identities; rather, I think that the knowledge of orientalism forms part of this new identity. Sherazade becomes as fascinated in orientalist practices (books, art, etc.) as Julien, though her experiences eventually appear to me to be much more engaging and overwhelming. The Delacroix chapter (only eight pages into the text) invites us to view orientalist art as a defining link between Julien and Sherazade. It is possible to argue that she is swept along in the trail of his fascination but also that he enacts some sort of belated imperial power over her (a highly sketchy assumption); nevertheless, Sebbar does present Sherazade as initially complicit in this viewing, though the fact that she must later view orientalist paintings alone is equally significant: Several times they’d both hurried in to see the Delacroix, then out again without seeing anything except these women because that was what they came for, just for them . . . [Julien] told Sherazade about the women of the harems, Delacroix’s and Fromentin’s North Africa, the Arab farmworkers and the poor-white settlers he’d known in Algeria, the street children he’d always played with. (pp. 9–10) Delacroix’s painting seems to prompt a stream of associations that take Julien from the oriental imaginings of writers and artists through to the more gritty reality of the North Africa that he knows (a very bizarre string of associations, yet in tune with Julien’s aesthetic temperament). The son of pieds noirs returned to France, Julien’s experience of Algeria is informed by both of these often-conflicting discourses whereas Sherazade’s only tenuous link is that she is Algerian by origin. As Gauch interestingly notes: Curiously, Julien inherited his first paintings of odalisques from his mother, a woman who was intimately acquainted with the harsh realities of Algerian women’s lives and who must have found in these works some expression of a lost idealism regarding Algeria. These images of a shadowy, feminized Orient thus evoke that (mythic) time before Julien’s identity was fractured by exile. Indeed, Julien prefers the distant, dreamy, inaccessible . . . women of Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger above all others. (My emphasis)47

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I find this idea of a lost Algeria fascinating, as it suggests that the odalisque paintings and paintings of harem scenes could have been consumed as objects of pleasure and fantasy by women. Though Sherazade is initially sceptical about the odalisques, her continuing consumption of them suggests that something else is at work. Though both Julien and Sherazade dedicate time and effort to more noble preoccupations, they seem continuously drawn back to orientalia. Reading about the Algerian War of Independence, though admirable, does not hold the same textual delights as reading exotic adventure tales such as Fromentin’s Between Sea and Sahara: An Orientalist Adventure and Pierre Loti’s The Sahara.48 After viewing the odalisques at the Louvre, Sherazade asks Julien to tell her about the Algerian War of Independence. ‘That’s another story,’ says Julien, reluctant ‘to talk about about the Algerian war, after the Louvre’ (p. 10). Julien in fact, wrestles with his interest in orientalism and orientalia. Though he tries to engage with social and political realities of contemporary Algeria, he soon tires and finds himself drawn to his real interests: Julien read to the end of these pages and promised himself he would do some research into primary schoolteachers in Algeria, at the Overseas Archives in Aix-en-Provence, but he got bitten by a passion for Orientalist painting and gradually discovered he had all the sublime faults of a collector. (p. 16) Here, orientalism is shown to be a passion that informs Julien’s relationship with Sherazade, a relationship bound by outdated associations that nevertheless continue to thrive. In Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb, Jarrod Hayes claims that: In addition to escaping the French police, her father, rapists, and other men who try to control her, She´razade dodges male gazes that try to bind her to the ide´es rec¸ues of femininity, especially ‘Oriental’ femininity. At a party with her friends France and Zouzou, She´razade is, as usual, appreciated by the Parisian chic uppercrust for her ‘exotic’ beauty.49 Sherazade and her friends find it hard to get away from some of the cruder imagery associated with ‘exotic’ beauty. Propositioned for a photo shoot, the girls are presented with outfits to evoke the jungle. The outfits represent a tigress, a zebra and a leopard. Hayes interestingly and correctly points out that, ‘posed in front of a camera by a man, these three women can be the object of a desiring gaze only when seen in the context of the jungle as savages; their beauty is an exotic, even animal beauty’.50 Nevertheless, this performance of sexuality is easier to denounce than the more complimentary, exoticised version that Sherazade has access to, through her own reading and through Julien. Though she may well be quite feisty in her reaction to the photographer who tries to impose an alternative idea of the exotic (all leopard and tiger suits),

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Julien is more subtle, and hence more convincing in his capture (to an extent) of Sherazade’s interest. Sherazade may try to dodge male gazes; nevertheless, she is not always successful, partly as she remains intrigued by some of the processes of looking. Although Hayes claims that ‘in other passages, she takes on the male Orientalizing gaze in other ways. She ridicules it, identifies with it, or sees possibilities of rewriting it through parody’, Hayes nevertheless admits that ‘ Julien sees her through Orientalist paintings such as Delacoix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement and Matisse’s Odalisques a` la culotte rouge,51 a seeing that Sherazade cannot control. Winifred Woodhull suggests, that for all of Julien’s critical attitudes towards all forms of cultural production: his passion for Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger and other paintings of that genre, transferred to the seventeen-year-old runaway, is shown, at certain junctures, to converge with and fuel sexist and racist ideologies circulating in France in the 1980s. Sherazade shows that Julien’s obsession with figures of Algerian women stems from one of the colonialist fantasies enacted in paintings such as the Femmes d’Alger, which positions the European spectator as the privileged observer of a forbidden scene, placing the harem entirely at his disposal.52 Woodhull makes clear that Julien’s perceptions of Sherazade are entirely in keeping with the French culture scene described by Sebbar. This suggests that Sherazade herself may have no involvement in the production of this image and has nothing to gain through producing and sustaining these connections. Hayes’s claim that ‘there is no original Oriental woman behind Matisse’s Odalisque, but Sherazade does not have access to the origin of her own identity any more than Matisse would’,53 is slightly misleading, as Sherazade does have access to a cultural background that she chooses to ignore (the family she runs away from, the Algeria she never goes to). Sherazade, argues Hayes, ‘must negotiate between various colonialist images of who she is, come to terms with these stereotypes, destroy some of them, and construct an identity out of the ruins’ (p. 231). This highly dynamic interpretation of Sherazade’s role places her in a politically active position, not one that we easily associate with her throughout the novel. To state that Julien’s exoticisation of Sherazade and Sherazade’s interest in orientalist painting can be a key to her past are too contradictory. Like the orientalist dream of mystery followed by conquest, Sherazade cannot bring together the image that Julien has of her (that she has helped create) with that very image of the Women of Algiers that she is so attracted to; it is as though the image of the possibility can only exist, for her, as image – any seeping through into reality results in frustration. In trying to measure herself against the image that Julien has of her (as a replica or even imitation) against an original (the artworks), Sherazade’s desire to flee in the end, ostensibly because (or for) the painting, suggests an escape for her position as replica (and a failed one at that) in order to try to find herself through her search for the original. I am not certain that I agree with this reading, though I have just

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formulated it here, for it occurs to me that the past that Sherazade seeks (whether knowingly or unknowingly) is one grounded in a knowledge of Algeria that may be more pertinent to her. Franc¸oise Lionnet, in her work Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity on the entire trilogy, claims that: [Sebbar] explores the fascination that exoticism and Orientalism exert upon the imagination of her heroine, a young beure (an Algerian born in France of immigrant parents) who works her way across France and through its museums, discovering there for the first time a representation of her own cultural heritage.54 It is interesting for us to explore orientalist painting (in the first novel) as a cultural heritage for Sherazade. If we understand heritage to be a link with the past of a particular culture or community, it seems clear that what Sherazade discovers is a highly stylised Western orientalist representation of how a particular understanding of her culture was consumed at a particular point in time. To view this as a representation of her heritage is to imbue it with a remarkable significance and, to an extent, undermine Algerian nationalist narratives. Lionnet argues that Sherazade creates a new ‘tale, one better suited to her own discoveries’, as she moves and navigates her way around the various ‘Orientalist myths’.55 And yet, Sherazade is already creating her own ‘tale’ through her avid reading of Algerian history – interrupted by these forays into more exciting, albeit slightly fantastic, diversions. Anne Donadey provides a more explicit discussion on the presence of orientalist paintings in Djebar and Sebbar, specifically Delacroix: ‘Both Djebar and Sebbar have made Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger a central intertext of their works. To an extent, their protagonists accept Delacroix’s representation – which they feel has something to teach them about their own identity – at the same time as they subvert and modify it.’56 Donadey and Lionnet here argue for the will towards modification and subversion, yet I want to argue that engaging with orientalism itself through exoticising it and treating its as another world is in fact a form of resistance to any closed set of meanings that the paintings may have come to represent. I do not wholly agree with Woodhull’s contention that ‘Sherazade’s proposed voyage, which is never realised in the frame of the novel, must be seen not as a search for a bounded, ‘‘authentic’’ identity, but rather as a project to recover her past in order to reinscribe it in today’s Paris, where Sherazade intends to resume her relationship with Julien’.57 Again, this sense of the past can be seen as a projected dream that Sherazade has (rather than a retrievable reality), a dream that she has yet to see through (akin to Julien’s dream about her). Julien mediates between the orientalist paintings that he admires (‘He told himself that he must get rid of this strange trouble which made his heart beat faster every time he saw these two female figures in an Orientalist picture’ (p. 78)) and Sherazade, who does not fit in with what he calls an ‘artificial exoticism’ (p. 79). Nevertheless, Sherazade is intrigued and fascinated by the paintings to the extent that she herself turns into a collector. When Julien offers Sherazade one of his recently

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acquired (from the Montreuil flea market) watercolour of ‘an Arab woman with a baby in her arms. A woman from the south, a Berber most likely, not wearing a veil’, Sherazade is not sure whether she wants it (p. 104). Nevertheless, as we near the end of the novel, the desire to experience such art is more palpable: Julien and Sherazade had never spent the whole day together in Paris. Sherazade wanted to go to the Louvre to look at the Women of Algiers, always the same ones . . . Sherazade repeated that she wanted to go to the Louvre to look at the Women of Algiers and the bathing women, that she’s only caught a glimpse of when they’d hurried past together to get to Delacroix without looking at anything else. The medley of plump white bodies of Ingres’s Turkish Bath astonished her. (pp. 201–2) This growing curiosity is perhaps what leads Sherazade to decide to spend the night at the National Centre of Art and Culture, where she constructs a list in her ‘red and black notebook’ of nine paintings of women by famous artists. When she comes across Henri Matisse’s Woman Reading, against a Black Background, her reaction to seeing a genuine Matisse is so strong that she has to retrace her steps, feeling as excited as she did when seeing Women of Algiers at the Louvre (pp. 262–3). However, it is when she retraces her steps that she comes across Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Trousers. Sherazade stares at this painting for a long time. Immediately afterwards ‘her mind is made up. Sherazade will go to Algeria. She no longer hesitates’ (pp. 264–5). She promptly buys out all the postcards of the Odalisque in the gift shop. This scene is one of the most evocative ones in the novel in terms of what it might be suggesting. Sherazade is firstly impressed and in awe of Matisse, or what that name represents to her within her current cultural experience (or education). Although we are told that Sherazade is ‘moved’ by the painting, we are told little else (p. 264). Here, it seems possible not to view the painting as an aesthetic form that reveals a past that Sherazade must subvert, recuperate, move away from or turn on its head (for as I have argued above, it is a very specific aesthetic when viewed in context). Throughout the novel, Sherazade toys with the idea of going to Algeria, though not necessarily because she seeks to understand her past. Although Sherazade stares at the painting and is fascinated by it, she ‘does not try to analyse why’ (p. 264). This is a noncommittal ending, and certainly not an ending that points towards a search for identity or heritage. Before leaving, Sherazade scribbles on the back of postcards these words to her friends Zouzou and France: ‘It’s on account of her that I’m going’ (p. 272). In attempting to understand why Sebbar is so keen to emphasise France and Algeria’s orientalist heritage and to draw attention to it, it became clear to me that Sebbar was possibly attempting a critique of what, in Boer’s terms, constitutes and makes so effective the discourse of orientalism to Sherazade. At the start of the novel, Sherazade does not recognise herself in Julien’s comparisons to the women in Delacroix’s paintings (p. 9), yet later, she becomes gripped by their

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presence, as though she has learnt to read into them. A careful look at the structure of the novel reveals a repetition of what constitutes the orientalist scene (pp. 9–10, 78, 201, 203) that Sherazade comes to appreciate aesthetically: She was certain that if she’d talked to her squat-mates about The Women of Algiers in the Louvre, they’d have laughed at her, they’d have called her a bourgeoise or a tourist, she’d have felt insulted . . . for them, pictures in art galleries represented rotten bourgeoise culture, the decadent West, it was old, stale, dead . . . it didn’t exist. (p. 256) In trying to understand how Sherazade finds herself at ease with the paintings, it strikes me that Sebbar is suggesting that an understanding of the trappings of orientalist art can in turn render it fascinating because it becomes intelligible, like a game that one can participate in. Boer suggests that we may want to look at how orientalist art ‘passes itself off as natural and a-historical’ (p. 9) and how we can then trace these effects and the ways in which they then become stereotypes that we find ourselves compelled to ‘undermine’. With particular reference to Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger, Boer analyses the construction of the painting and how we come to understand what it is that we are viewing. Fascinatingly, through an analysis of the watch (situated on the left side of the woman seated in the middle), a mirror and a half open door, Boer argues that any interpretation that seeks to bestow a stereotypical, timeless essence that we may want to perceive in the painting is foreclosed. She suggests that these objects point to a harem that is not enclosed, claustrophobic and inhospitable and that these objects ‘effectively situate Femmes d’Alger in a cross-cultural encounter that evokes multiple responses and readings’ (p. 100). Boer writes that: Therefore, what I consider this painting’s critical moment is that it entices the spectator to realize that the group of women on the right forms a representation of the Orient, but neither of the Orient as a truth, nor as a unidimensional entity. The painting proposes a duplicitous reading in re-reading in which the difference between ‘self ’ and ‘other’ is first stated, but then questioned, when the mutual construction of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ underpins the painting as a whole. (My emphasis)58 It seems to me that Sherazade is running not away from but towards what the paintings evoke: another world. In showing how an ‘orientalist’ painting participates in its own construction (the carpets, the hookah, etc.) and its own deconstruction, Boer reveals what is at risk in presenting any straightforward explanation of the inclusion of orientalist objects by both Sebbar and Djebar. It is not enough to say that Sherazade views the odalisques as representations that she must learn to move away from – this would reduce the paintings to the representation of stereotype, which in turn suggests that art does not participate in an index of meaning. Rather, I want to propose that what Sebbar and, to an

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extent, Djebar in ‘Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound’ argue for is their participation in the process of signification that constructs a vision of the Orient; a participation in the process of exoticism. Though Sherazade does not try to analyse why Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Trousers moves her, it does seem that she finally participates in the enjoyment of her, rather than identifying with or rejecting her (p. 264). Asked by the sales assistant at the museum bookshop what she likes about the odalisque, Sherazade answers: ‘I’m curious.’ This chapter is dedicated to Inge E. Boer (1957–2004).

Notes

Introduction 1 Amal Amireh, ‘Publishing in the West: Prospects for Arab Women Writers’, in Al Jadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts, 2.10 (1996), http://leb.net/ ~aljadid/features/0210amireh.html [accessed 20 March 2007] (para. 20 of 22). I would like to note however, that Arab critics are also prone to this kind of uncomplicated move. 2 Amal Amireh, ‘Publishing in the West’ (para. 20 of 22). 3 Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba (eds), Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002). I discuss many of these works in Chapter 1. 4 Some of the works mentioned here are also available from the University of Cairo Press. 5 Dalya Cohen-Mor (ed., trans. and introd.) Arab Women Writers: An Anthology of Short Stories (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2005). 6 Jo Glanville (ed.), Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women (London and San Francisco, CA: Telegram Books, 2006) 7 Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.), Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 8 Some examples of Zeina Abirached’s work are [Beyrouth] Catharsis (Paris: E´ditions Cambourakis, 2006) and 38, rue Youssef Semaani (Paris: E´ditions Cambourakis, 2006). 9 Leı¨la Sebbar, Christelle Taraud and Jean-Michel Belorgey, Femmes D’Afrique du Nord: Cartes Postales (1885–1930) (Saint-Pourc¸ain-sur-Sioule: Bleu autour, 2006). 10 Maysa Abou-Youssef Hayward, ‘Introduction’, Studies in the Humanities, 30.1–2 (2003), 1–6, (p. 6).

1 Women, not heroines or icons of modernity 1 I have borrowed the second part of this title from Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions’, in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univesity Press, 1989), p. 23. 2 Two works considered pioneering in the field are: Evelyn Accad, Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Contemporary Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World (Montreal: Editions Naaman, 1978) and Mona Mikhail, Images of Arab Women: Fact and Fiction (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1979). These works argue for a need to look closely at the ways in which female characters are represented by male and female novelists. Nevertheless, I would like to point out here that the works by women

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4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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writers that Accad profiles are fully or semi autobiographical. This sets up a rather troubled framework for the comparison between the literary representation of women in Arab men’s literature and the self-reflexive nature of autobiographical writings by women. For a review of Accad’s book see Margaret. R. Fete, ‘Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Contemporary Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World’, The French Review, 53.2 (1979), 323–33. Mikhail’s more recent work looks at women’s roles in a range of cultural production, Seen and Heard: A Century of Arab Women in Literature and Culture (Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing, 2004). Amal Amireh, ‘Writing the Difference: Feminists’ Invention of the ‘‘Arab Woman’’’ in Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film, eds Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997). Here, Amireh also acknowledges works that have successfully avoided this bracketing. Here it is possible to imagine other ways in which the writing could have been inaugurated: as cultural products contextually embedded, as creative and artistic creations, as alternative literary choices, etc. Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba (eds), Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002). Joseph Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 2. Faqir pays attention to the individual novelist in each introduction although one sentence (with very slight variations) is repeated in all of the introductions (I intend to revisit this in Chapter 4): ‘Women in this series create a different language where the patriarch is lampooned and ridiculed, and where their oral and daily experiences are placed at the epicentre of the current discourse.’ As I discuss later, this had resulted in a status quo that current scholars have either decided to maintain, albeit updating theoretical references, or to challenge. With the exception of several references, such as that to Gilbert and Gubar on p. 214, Zeidan’s analysis does not interrogate debates within Western feminist theory. See Chapter 2 here for a discussion on Judith Butler and Nawal El Saadawi. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists, p. 3. I am thinking here of feminists such as Carol Gilligan, bell hooks, Denise Riley and Liz Stanley among others. Miram Cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 79–80. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists, pp. 176–7. Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘‘Women’’ in History’, in Feminisms, eds Sarah Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 241–6 (p. 243). Cooke, War’s Other Voices, p. 106. Carol Gilligan, ‘In a Different Voice’, in Feminisms, eds Sarah Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 146–52 (p. 150). Riley’s book, Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History, was published in 1988. I am using it here as an example of how questions within feminist theory were already being debated. Cooke, War’s Other Voices, p. 80. Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (eds), Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (London: Virago Press, 1992), p. xi. Ibid., p. xxxvi. I have decided here not to concentrate on Islamic feminism as it is a highly specialised area that has generated its own debates. I will instead refer sporadically to some of the Islamic femininsts whose works have also been influential in the conceptualisation of Arab feminism. For information on the debates within current work on Islamic feminism see Anouar Majid, ‘The Politics of Feminism in Islam’, Signs:

Notes

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43

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Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 23.1 (1998), 321–61. This should be read in tandem with Suad Joseph’s ‘Comment on Majid’s ‘‘The Politics of Feminism in Islam’’: Critique of Politics and the Politics of Critique’, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 23.2 (1998), 363–89. See Nadje Sadiq Al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007) for an in-depth discussion on this. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Men, Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), p. 16. Mervat Hatem, ‘Egyptian Discourses on Gender and Political Liberalization: Do Secularist and Islamist Views Really Differ?’, Middle East Journal, 48:1 (1994), 661–76 (p. 661). Malti-Douglas, Men, Women and God(s), p. 16. Rajeswari Mohan, ‘Loving Palestine: Nationalist Activism and Feminist Agency in Leila Khaled’s Subversive Bodily Acts’, Interventions, 1:1 (1998), 52–80 (p. 79). Haiden Moghissi, Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of a Post-Modern Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1999), p. 9. All further references to this work will appear in the text. Abu-Lughod, ‘Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions’, p. 3. Ibid., p. 3. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Cultural Politics’, in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 243. Badran and Cooke (eds), Opening the Gates. See ‘Introduction’. Ibid., p. xviii. For example, there are no Arab entries in any standard feminist reader and the entries included in the Feminist Postcolonial Theory reader seem to miss an opportunity in terms of including diverse, informative material. This reader is discussed in more detail below. Badran and Cooke (eds), Opening the Gates, p. xviii. Ibid., p. xviii. Abu-Lughod, ‘Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions’, p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. This interests me very much and I have pursued various possibilities in Anastasia Valassopoulos, ‘‘‘Also I wanted so much to leave for the West’’: Postcolonial Feminism Rides the Third Wave’, in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, eds Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 198–211. Malti-Douglas, Men, Women and God(s), pp. 17–18. This premise will form part of my next project: The Consumption of Western Culture in the Contemporary Middle East. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Cultural Politics’, p. 243. All further references to this work will appear in the text. In fact, Moghissi takes this much further when she claims that ‘the newly manufactured image of a strong Muslim woman in active negotiation with a Muslim male elite might produce contradictory consequences. It might ornament gender experience under Islamic fundamentalism and mystify the consequences for non-compliance for women who do not share the beliefs of their Muslim sisters . . . this trend gets its theoretical inspiration, particularly, from postmodernist relativism, which for better or worse, has emerged as a fascinating antidote to the Eurocentric totalising metatheories and the universalism of liberal pluralism, Marxism and feminism’ (p. 50).

158 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

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By writers such as Leila Ahmed, Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke amongst others. Abu-Lughod, ‘Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions’, p. 23. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 22. See Hatem, ‘Egyptian Discourses on Gender and Political Liberalization’, p. 676. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions’, p. 23. Gayle Rubin, interviewed by Judith Butler, ‘Sexual Traffic’, in Coming Out of Feminism, eds Mandy Merck, Naomi Segal and Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), p. 64. Butler, ‘Sexual Traffic’, p. 64. For example, at the time of this interview, Rubin was researching the gay male leather community in San Francisco. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (eds), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 2–3. All further references to this work will appear in the text. Ibid., p. 9. Lewis and Mills include female circumcision/female genital mutilation, the burqa, the veil and seclusion as examples of these difficult areas of ‘intervention’. Amal Amireh, ‘Publishing in the West: Problems and Prospects for Arab Women Writers’, in Al Jadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts, 2.10 (1996) http:// leb.net/~aljadid/features/0210amireh.html [accessed 20 March 2007]. Ibid., (para. 9 of 22). I look at this in more detail in Chapter 2. Malti-Douglas, Men, Women and God(s), p. 198. Malti-Douglas is quoting from Sabry Hafez, ‘Intentions and Realisation in the Narratives of Nawal El-Saadawi’, Third World Quarterly, 11.3 (1989), 188–98. Amireh, ‘Publishing in the West’, (para. 7 of 22 and para. 8 of 22). Amin Malak, ‘Arab-Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity: The Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif ’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 20 (2000), 140–83 (p. 159). Ibid., p. 159. Amireh, ‘Publishing in the West’ (para. 8 of 22). Amireh also discusses this at length in ‘Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World’, in Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, eds Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 64–6. Amireh, ‘Publishing in the West’ (para. 17 of 22). Majaj, Sunderman and Saliba (eds), Intersections, p. xvii. A recent internet search of college courses across the US and UK revealed similar results. Amireh, ‘Publishing in the West’ (para. 21 of 22). Ibid. (para. 21 of 22). Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg (eds), Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 11. Waı¨l S. Hassan, ‘Postcolonial Theory and Modern Arabic Literature: Horizons of Application’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 33.1 (2002), 44–64 (p. 59). Hassan, ‘Postcolonial Theory and Modern Arabic Literature’, p. 60. One such successful project has been Caroline Rooney’s African Literature, Animism and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Hassan, ‘Postcolonial Theory and Modern Arabic Literature’, p. 60 Abu-Lughod, ‘Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions’, p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 19. Also mentioned by Abu-Lughod on page 18. Lewis and Mills (eds), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, p. 2.

Notes

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76 Miriam Cooke, ‘Feminist Transgressions in the Postcolonial Arab World’, Critique, 14 (1999), 93–105 (p. 93). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 77 These are HAWWA and The Journal of Arab Women Studies. 78 Amireh, ‘Framing Nawal El Saadawi’. 79 Majaj, Sunderman and Saliba (eds), Intersections, p. xvii. 80 Ibid., p. xviii. Some examples are: Brinda J. Mehta’s Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing, Suzanne Gauch’s Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism and Islam and Winifred Woodhull’s Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonisation, and Literatures, which have established the growing interest in this field. 81 A 2006 monograph by Jane Hiddlestone entitled Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria, is one of the few books in English dedicated to an Arab female author since Fedwa MaltiDouglas’s important 1995 work Men, Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics. 82 Majaj, Sunderman and Saliba, Intersections, p. xix. 83 Ibid., p. xxii. 2 Again: Nawal El Saadawi 1 Daphne Grace, The Woman in the Muslin Mask: Veiling and Identity in Postcolonial Literature (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 82. 2 Ibid., pp. 82–3. 3 Including my own 2004 article on the politics of medicine in El Saadawi’s early novels (referenced in note 8). 4 Caroline Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 27. 5 Jane Hiddlestone, Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), p. 85. 6 Amal Amireh, ‘Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World’, in Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, eds Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 33–67. 7 Amireh, ‘Framing Nawal El Saadawi’, p. 45. 8 See Anastasia Valassopoulos, ‘‘‘Words written by a pen sharp as a scalpel’’: Gender and Medical Practice in the Early Fiction of Nawal El Saadawi and Fatmata Conteth’, Research in African Literatures, 35.1 (2004), 87–107. 9 Numerous similar arguments have unfolded over certain works by, for example, J. M. Coetzee, where geographical or historical location is not always obvious. 10 Therese Saliba, ‘On the Bodies of Third World Women’, College Literature, 22.1 (1995), 131–47 (p. 143). See this article on the subject of prostitutes in Arab culture and literature. 11 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 222. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 12 Though Mohanty cites this as Arif Dirlik’s formulation, I have always understood it to be so through El Saadawi’s use of the term, which she favours over ‘Eastern’ and certainly over ‘Third-World’. For more information on One-Third/Two-Third Worlds see Mohanty, p. 227, who in turn cites Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash (1998). 13 In Feminism without Borders, Mohanty writes of reading El Saadawi: ‘In the early 1980s, reading Audre Lorde, Nawal el Saadawi, Angela Davis, Cherrie Moraga, bell hooks, Gloria Joseph, Paula Gunn Allen, Barbara Smith, Merle Woo, and Mitsuye Yamada, among others, generated a sort of recognition that was intangible but very inspiring’, p. 128. 14 Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics, p. 56.

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15 Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Men, Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 14–15. 16 Sara Ahmed, ‘Intimate Touches: Proximity and Distance in International Feminist Dialogues’, The Oxford Literary Review, 19.1–2 (1997), 19–47. 17 Nawal El Saadawi, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (London: Zed Books, 1997), p. 56. 18 George Lemer, ‘The Progressive Interview: Nawal El Saadawi’, Progressive (April 1992), 32–35. 19 Amireh, ‘Framing Nawal El Saadawi’, p. 57. 20 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 159. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 21 El Saadawi, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader, p. 117. 22 Ibid., p. 166. This issue is also discussed in Haiden Moghissi’s work Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: the Limits of a Post-Modern Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1999). 23 El Saadawi, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader, p. 169. 24 Spivak discusses this very problem in ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, eds Miche`le Barrett and Anne Phillips (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). 25 This conflict potentially becomes a matter of the difference between Westernised and non-Westernised feminisms. What is highlighted is the difference between the theorisation of woman-as-body (highly complicit with masculine science) and allowing for a thinking/questioning female subject. Benita Parry also questions Spivak’s position on this matter in Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 17–18. 26 Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, p. 190. 27 Ahmed, ‘Intimate Touches’, p. 31. 28 Moghissi explains ‘Islamic Feminism’ as a feminism that tries to work within the parameteres of a fully religious society. I suppose the issues here are to what extent do these feminists take on the masculinist structure of the interpretation of religion? See Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Islam (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Cooke writes specifically on El Saadawi in chapter 3. 29 Sara Ahmed, ‘Review of Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures’, Interventions: International Journal of Poscolonial Studies, 1.3 (1999), 476–80. 30 Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, trans. and ed. Sherif Hetata (London: Zed Books, 1980), p. 48. All further references to this work will appear in the text. I have revisited these contentions (in unpublished material), but as enabling circumstances rather than as foreclosing ones in the repertoire of Umm Kulthum, though here I have to acknowledge El Saadawi’s forceful opposition to the effects of popular culture. 31 Ibid., p. 37. 32 Assia Djebar, ‘Introduction to Nawal al-Saadawi’s Ferdous: A Voice from Hell’, trans. Miriam Cooke, in Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, eds Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (London: Virago, 1990), pp. 386–93 (p. 387). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 33 It seems a pity that much comparative work on El Saadawi and Djebar concentrates on their treatment of Islam’s traces on the social and textual life of women. There seems to me to be a much wider potential in a comparison of their overall feminist trajectory. 34 Djebar, ‘Introduction to Nawal al-Saadawi’s Ferdous: A Voice from Hell’, p. 388. 35 Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, p. 231. 36 Saliba, ‘On the Bodies of Third World Women’, p. 137. 37 I have argued this at length in Anastasia Valassopoulos, ‘‘‘Also I wanted so much to leave for the West’’: Postcolonial Feminism Rides the Third Wave’, in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, eds Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 198–211.

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38 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 19. 39 Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, trans. Y. Sherif Hetata (London: Zed Books, 1975; 1983), p. 3. 40 Ibid., p. 4. 41 Ibid., p. 5. 42 Ibid., p. 6. 43 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). 44 El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, p. 11, p. 7. 45 Nawal El Saadawi, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, trans. Catherine Cobham (London: Al Saqi Books, 1956; 1988), p. 44. 46 El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, pp. 43–4. 47 Ibid., p. 67. 48 Ibid., pp. 67–8. 49 Malti-Douglas, Men, Women and God(s), p. 54. Malti-Douglas discusses many aspects of El Saadawi’s novel in chapter 3, ‘The Physician and the Prostitute’. 50 C. L. Innes, ‘Conspicuous Consumption: Corruption and the Body Politic in the Writing of Ayi Kwei Armah and Ama Ata Aidoo’, in Essays in African Writing, Vol II, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (Oxford: Heinemann, 1995), pp. 1–19 (p. 14). 51 Elspeth Probyn, ‘Beyond Food/Sex: Eating and an Ethics of Existence’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16.2 (1999), 215–28 (p. 216). 52 El Saadawi, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, p. 10. 53 Nawal El Saadawi, Two Women in One, trans. Osman Nusairi and Jana Gough (London: Al Saqi, 1975; 1985), p. 10. 54 El Saadawi, Two Women in One, p. 11. 55 A protection it can never give because it is powerless in the wake of the symbolic. 56 El Saadawi, Two Women in One, p. 81. 57 El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, p. 18. 58 El Saadawi, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, pp. 15–17. 59 El Saadawi, Two Women in One, pp. 118–19. 60 All the quotes in this paragraph are from ibid., p. 100. 61 See Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in AraboIslamic Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). See chapter 7, ‘Nawaˆl al-Sa’daˆwıˆ and Empowerment through Medicine’. 62 See Franc¸oise Lionnet’s Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 129–53. 63 El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, p. 15. 64 Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 190. 65 Here I mean female circumcision. 66 El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, p. 21. 67 I am thinking here of how the word ‘prostitute’ is often used to stand in for women who are involved in prostitution. The conflation of prostitute and woman is no accident and suggests that they are one and the same. 68 El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve, p. 167. 69 As to which authors El Saadawi is referring to, I can think of Naguib Mahfouz’s trilogy, which undertakes to describe prostitutes at great length. 70 El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, p. 49. Firdaus’s husband is described in this scene: ‘he was already over sixty, whereas I had not yet turned nineteen. On his chin, below the lip, was a large swelling, with a hole in the middle. Some days the hole would be dry, but on others it would turn into a rusty old tap exuding drops red in colour like blood, or whitish yellow, like pus . . . on days when it was not dry I would turn my lips and face away to avoid the odour of dead dogs that emanated from it’, p. 43.

162 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

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Ibid., p. 49. Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 2. El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, p. 62. Interestingly, I have come across a description in a contemporary Greek novel that likens a policeman to a common pimp: ‘dem rtlpahot*ra sot| lpasrot| ot*sx| g* a*kkx| – eivam lot*qe| i* die| le sot| msabasfg*de|.’ [‘I didn’t like cops anyway, their faces were just like those of any pimp’], from Laskou, Aleka Hardcore (Athens: Okeanidis, 2000), p. 42. El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, pp. 70–1. Ibid., pp. 75–6. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., all the above quotes are from p. 90. Ibid., p. 100. Sophocles, ‘Antigone’, trans. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald in Literature: Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay, ed. Robert DiYanni (New York: Random House, 1986). See Prologue, scene II and scene IV in particular. El Saadawi, Two Women in One, pp. 93–4. Grewal and Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies, p. 17.

3 Danger and creativity: Lebanese war novelists 1 The idea for this title came from an essay by Nawal El Saadawi entitled ‘Dissidence and Creativity’ from a special issue on ‘Gender, Islam and Orientalism’ in Women, A Cultural Review, 6.1 (1995), 1–17. 2 Miriam Cooke, ‘Mapping Peace’, in Women and War in Lebanon, ed. Lamia Rustum Shehadeh, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999), pp. 73–88, p. 85. 3 Miriam Cooke, ‘Arab Women Arab Wars’, Cultural Critique, Winter Issue (1994–95), 5–29 (p. 6). 4 One the most mystifying aspects of researching this chapter was the extent to which critiques of Lebanese writers of the war identify the authors with the protagonists and their viewpoints. For two particularly good examples see Nazik Saba Yared, ‘Identity and Conflict in the Novels of Contemporary Lebanese Women Novelists’, Edebiyaˆt: Journal of Near Eastern Literatures, 12 (2001), 215–28 and Carol Fadda-Conrey, ‘Exilic Memories of War: Lebanese Women Writers Looking Back’, Studies in the Humanties 30.1–2 (2003), 7–20. It has been surprisingly difficult to engage with these critics as their use of biographical details acts as deterrent to alternative viewpoints. Although articles such as these provide interesting biographical information they perform a disservice to this area of scholarship through reducing the works to faint shadows of their writers. Carol Fadda-Conrey bases her argument on the premise that Lebanon is currently facing ‘collective amnesia’ over events in the war, a sentiment echoed by Robert Fisk (lecture given at Purdue University, 20 November 2002). Elise Salem Manganaro writes that there is an ‘active Lebanese cultural and educational industry that blatantly denies the complicated and messy internal Lebanese reality’, p. 121 in ‘Lebanon Mythologized or Lebanon Deconstructed: Two Narratives of National Consciousness’ in Women and War in Lebanon, ed. Lamia Rustum Shehadeh (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999), pp. 112–28. Nevertheless, on the cultural level, the sheer production of articles, art, film, etc. testifies to an active and ongoing endeavour to remember. For excellent recent examples see the graphic book by Zeina Abirached, [Beirut] Catharsis, (Paris: E´ditions Cambourakis, 2006) and Suzanne Cotter, Out of Beirut, (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006). 5 By ‘possibilities’ I mean any experience that is not recognisable as having previously occurred. 6 For work on other Lebanese novelists of the war period see, among others, Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge: Cam-

Notes

7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29

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bridge University Press, 1988); Evelyn Accad, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York and London: New York University Press, 1990); and Mona Takieddine Amyuni, ‘A Panorama of Lebanese Women Writers, 1975–95’, in Women and War in Lebanon ed. Lamia Rustum Shehadeh (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999), pp. 89–111. Accad, Sexuality and War, p. 41. Hottell singles out Accad’s words from her study entitled Sexuality and War and cites it in her essay. Ruth A. Hottel, ‘A Poetics of Pain: Evelyn Accad’s Critical and Fictional World’, World Literature Today, 71.3 (1997), 511–16, http://find.galegroup.com [accessed 23 March 2007] (para. 27 of 27). Ibid., (para. 27 of 27). Inge Boer, ‘Public Violence Enters the Private: Assia Djebar and Hanan Al-Shaykh on Civil War’, in Convergences and Interferences: Newness in Intercultural Practices, eds Kathleen Gyssels, Isabel Hoving and Maggie Ann Bowers (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 93–105, p. 96. Rajeswari Mohan, ‘Loving Palestine; Nationalist Activism and Feminist Agency in Leila Khaled’s Subversive Bodily Acts’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 1.4 (1998), 52–80 (p. 53). Ibid., p. 53. Fadia Faqir (ed. and introd.), In the House of Silence: Autobiographical Essays by Arab Women Writers (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1998), p. 31. Boer, ‘Public Violence Enters the Private’, p. 95. Faqir, In the House of Silence, p. 21. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990; 1999), p. xxi. Fawzia Rashid, ‘Writing and the Pursuit of Female Identity’, in In the House of Silence, ed. and introd. Fadia Faqir (Reading: Garnet, 1998), p. 125, pp. 128–9. Miriam Cooke, Women and the War Story (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 4. Ibid., p. 11. This notion is reminiscient of Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas, who uses the onset of the Second World War to intensify an analysis of masculine society and capitalism, reading the former as an outcome of the latter. For an illuminating discussion on Lebanese nationalism see Elise Salem, Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003). See chapters 1, 2 and 3 in particular. Cooke, Women and the War Story, p. 293. Miriam Cooke, ‘Wo-man, Retelling the War Myth’ (there is an ‘X’ over the ‘Wo’ of Woman in the original) in Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds), Gendering War Talk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 177–204. In this essay Cooke explains that ‘by placing gender at the centre of an analysis of war we begin to question the myth of war’ (p. 178). This chapter deals specifically with fiction written about and during the war. For a more general discussion on Lebanese women writers that incorporates war fiction see Samira Aghacy, ‘Lebanese Women’s Fiction: Urban Identity and the Tyranny of the Past’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 33 (2001), 503–23. Fadda-Conrey, ‘Exilic Memories of War’ p. 7. Ibid., pp. 8, 9. Amal Amireh, ‘Bearing Witness: The Politics of Form in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 14.3 (2005), 251–63 (p. 262). Manganaro, ‘Lebanon Mythologized or Lebanon Deconstructed’, p. 125. Mona Fayad, ‘Reinscribing Identity: Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Writing’, College Literature, 22.1 (1995), 147–59, http://find.galegroup.com [accessed 23 March 2007] (para. 13 of 47).

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30 I am here referring to Miriam Cooke’s argument that many women writers who wrote either during or after the Algerian revolution were too caught up in the nationalist moment and did not seize the moment to call for sexual liberation and gender equality. For details see ‘Arab Women Arab Wars’, p. 18: ‘[1967] marks the beginning of a seismic shift. Wars in the Arab world, which until then had been treated as discrete events, usually in connection with a colonial power, came to be regarded as systemic. The Palestinians’ plight became a pan-Arab cause, if not always in reality then certainly in rhetoric. With this came a change in expectations of Palestinian women’s behaviour and coincidentally, of their writing. Five years after the end of the Algerian Revolution, Palestinians were invoking its lessons: the use of violence in the struggle for independence; the indispensability of women to national liberation; and the importance for women of remaining vigilant on all fronts so as to be able to withstand [ . . . ] a repetition of Algerian women’s experience.’ 31 Mohan, ‘Loving Palestine’. 32 Here Mohan is referring to Robin Morgan’s work The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 33 I do not here intend to give my account of the long history behind the wars in Lebanon. For information on the historical narrative of the civil war see Ussama Makdisi, ‘Reconstructing the Nation-State: The Modernity of Sectarianism in Lebanon’, Middle East Report (Summer 1996) at http://www.merip.org/mer200/makdisi.htm; Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); Walid Phares, Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance, (London: L. Reinner, 1995); Michael Johnson, All Honourable Men: The Social Origins of War in Lebanon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001); Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Dilip Hiro, Lebanon: Fire and Embers, A History of the Lebanese Civil War (Basingstoke: Palgave Macmillan, 1993); Sandra Mackey, Lebanon: A House Divided (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) and Thomas Collelo (ed.), ‘Lebanon’s History – Civil War’ at The Federal Research Division – Library of Congress, The Bureau of Public Affairs, US Department of State (1997), among other sources. 34 Suzanne Cotter, Out of Beirut (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006), pp. 27–8. 35 Lamia Rustum Shehadeh, ‘The War in Lebanon’, in Lamia Rustum Shehadeh (ed.), Women and War in Lebanon (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999), pp. 7– 29, p. 18. See entire article for a more detailed analysis of the causes of the war. 36 Christopher Stone, ‘The Ba’albakk Festival and the Rahbanis: Folklore, Ancient History, Musical Theatre, and Nationalism in Lebanon’, Arab Studies Journal, (Fall 2003/ Spring 2004), 10–39 (p. 11). See also Christopher Stone, ‘Ziyad Rahbani’s ‘‘Novelization’’ of Lebanese Musical Theatre or The Paradox of Parody’, in Middle Eastern Literatures, 8.2 (2005), 151–70. 37 See Stone, ‘The Ba’albakk Festival and the Rahbanis’, p. 17 for details on how the ‘narrative of the establishment of the Ba’albakk Festival virtually coincides with the post-World War I transfer of the stewardship of Lebanon to France’, and for more information on how the Maronite elite looked to France for cultural endorsement and for the discourse of Phoenicianism, which I hope to look at in more detail in future articles. 38 See ibid., p. 32. See also Christopher Stone, Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon: The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation (London: Routledge, 2007). 39 Christopher Lane (ed.), The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 5. 40 Cooke, ‘Woman, Retelling the War Myth’, p. 189. 41 Accad, ‘Sexuality and War’, pp. 56–7.

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42 Hanan Al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra, trans. Peter Ford (London: Quartet, 1986), pp. 136–7. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 43 This article provides detail on the nuances of the translation of this book and its structure. See Sabah Ghandour, ‘Hanan al-Shaykh’s Hikayat Zahra: A Counter-Narrative and a Counter History’, in Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, eds Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 231–49. 44 Ghandour, ‘Hanan al-Shaykh’s Hikayat Zahra’, p. 232. 45 Ibid., p. 234. 46 There are two examples of this. In one scene she does not offer aid to people hurt at the ‘Karantina’ disaster when she is given the opportunity to do so (Christian massacre of a Palestinian refugee camp in 1976). Also, she is unable to work at a hospital for more than a day. She says on page 124 of the novel: ‘It never occurred to me to think how these people were homeless, cut off from their past and carrying bitter memories so vivid they could never be forgotten. It never occurred to me that, with my parents away and me living by myself, I could have taken in at least one family. It never occurred to me to offer my services, no matter how limited they might have been.’ 47 Jean Laplanche, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1973), pp. 244–5. 48 Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 186. 49 Ibid., p. 187. 50 Ibid. 51 Hanan Al-Shaykh, Beirut Blues, trans. Catherine Cobham (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 2–3. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 52 For more on the French title of the novel Poste Restante Beyrouth, see Boer, ‘Public Violence Enters the Private’, p. 94. 53 For a baffled reaction of an ordinary family to the East/West divide of Beirut, see the opening sequence of West Beirut. Dir. Ziad Doueiri. La Sept Arte, 3B Productions, 1998. 54 Manganaro, ‘Lebanon Mythologized or Lebanon Deconstructed’, p. 125. 55 Mai Ghoussoub, Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within (London: Saqi, 1997). It is interesting that I do not see the book as an amalgam of the above. I have used these terms to facilitate the understanding of how it is put together (as described on the dust jacket). This remains, to me, the most significant work written on the Lebanese war to date. It combines unique observations with profound questions asked about the nature of this fifteen-year conflict. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 56 Nour Dados, ‘Balconies onto Beirut: Spatiality in the Travelling City’, International Journal of the Humanities, 3.8 (2005/6) 247–63 (p. 248). I would like to thank Kate Roy for generously pointing out this article to me. 57 Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 58 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Volume 21, S.E., p. 129. There is difficulty in tying the death drive to experience: in this way, we find a method of doing so. Also see D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel (London: Phoenix, 1981). This novel addresses the complex issues of the libido and the death drive. 59 See Lina Khatib, ‘The Voices of Taboos: Women in Lebanese War Cinema’, Women: A Cultural Review, 17.1 (2006), 65–77, for a view on women’s roles in Lebanese cinema that deals with the war.

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60 I know many people who specifically avoided revealing their Lebanese identity when outside of Lebanon, precisely to avoid hearing patronising observations. 61 Manganaro, ‘Lebanon Mythologized or Lebanon Deconstructed’, p. 122. 62 See Christopher Stone (note 36) for detail on the perpetuation of this unrealistic image of Lebanon. See also Salem, Constructing Lebanon, chapter 3. 63 Manganaro, ‘Lebanon Mythologized or Lebanon Deconstructed’, pp. 121, 123, 125. 64 Some of the first female suicide bombings in the Middle East occurred during the war in Lebanon. 65 The image of a bride is of course reminscient of the Christian martyrs understood as brides of Christ. Noha Samman’s actions are reminiscient of Sana’a Mouhaidli, the first Lebanese female suicide bomber. 66 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 99. 67 The difficulties in obtaining marriage proposals in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank can be quite serious – the continuing semiotic similarities may be a reflection on this crisis. 68 This is particularly poignant, as Lebanese families are renowned for having grand weddings. 69 See Chapter 2, on Nawal El Saadawi, for a representation of similar concerns. 70 Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, ‘On the Visual Representation of Martyrdom in Palestine’, Third Text, 20.3/4 (2006), 391–403 (p. 392). 71 For more information on the positions available to women in the various militias and armies, in particular the Lebanese forces, Amal and Hizbullah, see Lamia Rustum Shehadeh, ‘Women in the Lebanese Militia’ in Women and War in Lebanon, ed. Lamia Rustum Shehadeh (Gainesville, FL: University Press in Florida, 1999), pp. 145–66. 72 For a discussion on domestic help in Lebanese households see Khatib’s ‘The Voices of Taboos’. Khatib discusses Sri Lankan and Egyptian maids as other to the Lebanese privileged body. Latifa is Lebanese but very poor and to a large extent is viewed as disposable. 73 Latifa here, of course, changes her name and adopts a nom de guerre. 74 Fayad, ‘Reinscribing Identity: Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Writing’, (para. 7 of 47). 75 See Mohan, ‘Loving Palestine’, p. 74: Still determined to continue her militancy, she decides to assume a sort of radical disguise by way of a series of three ‘‘face-twisting’’ operations by a plastic surgeon . . . the entire procedure takes place without anaesthesia either because, according to one account, Khaled stoically refuses it, or because the necessary facilities were not available in the private clinic where she was operated on for security reasons. 76 I am reminded here of Wafa Idriss, the first Palestinian woman suicide bomber who, in her picture for the poster, wears a ‘black and white chequered shirt and a headband to emphasise her political affiliation with Fatah’. See Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, ‘On the Visual Representation of Martyrdom in Palestine’, p. 398 for the description and p. 399 for a photo of the poster. For an excellent survey and critique of Palestinian women martyrs, see Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (London: Constable and Robinson, 2004). 77 See Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb (eds), Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2000).

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4 The Garnet series: translations 1 This series was inaugurated at the ‘Translating the Life of the Arab Woman’ conference. For information see Amal Amireh, ‘Publishing in the West: Problems and Prospects for Arab Women Writers’, Al Jadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts, 2.10 (1996), http://www.aljadid.com/features/0210amireh.html 2 Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj (eds), Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 3. 3 Maria Tymoczko, ‘Post-colonial Writing and Literary Representation’, in PostColonial Translation: Theory and Practice, eds Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 21. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 4 Farida Abu-Haidar, ‘Arab Women Writers’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 28.3 (1996), 277–81. All further references to this work will appear in the text. References to other works by Abu-Haidar cited in this chapter will appear in the notes. 5 Farida Abu-Haidar, ‘A Voice from Iraq: The Fiction of Alia Mamdouh’, Women: A Cultural Review, 9.3 (1998), 305–11, (pp. 305–6). 6 Fadia Faqir, ‘Introduction’, The Stone of Laughter by Hoda Barakat, trans. Sophie Bennett (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1994), p. vii. 7 Luise von Flotow, Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’, (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 1997), p. 14. 8 This is the title of one of Von Flotow’s sections in the chapter ‘Revising Theories and Myths’, in Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’, p. 39. 9 Samira Kawar, ‘Reply to Review’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 28.3 (1996), 294–6 (p. 294). 10 Von Flotow, Translation and Gender, p. 44. 11 Kawar, ‘Reply to Review’, p. 296. 12 Von Flotow, Translation and Gender, p. 44. 13 Ibid., p. 44. 14 Fadia Faqir, ‘Introduction’, The Eye of the Mirror by Liana Badr, trans. Samira Kawar (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1991; 1994), p. ix. 15 For a short discussion on the translation of Alia Mamdouh’s Mothballs, see Farida Abu-Haidar, ‘A Voice from Iraq: the Fiction of Alia Mamdouh’. Unhelpfully, AbuHaidar suggests that readers ‘turn to the French translation which successfully captures the nuances and feel of the Arabic’, p. 308, n. 8. 16 Hussein Kadhim, ‘Review of Mothballs’, World Literature Today, 71.4 (1998), 857 (1page review). 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Fadia Faqir, ‘Introduction’, The Eye of the Mirror, p. ix. 20 The Tal Ezza’tar massacres at the hand of the Lebanese right-wing Phalangists came after a long and brutal siege of the refugee camp. 21 Therese Saliba and Jeanne Kattan, ‘Palestinian Women and the Politics of Reception’, in Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, eds Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 88. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 22 For details on other issues to do with the literary representation of exile and the particular aims of the intifada, see Jabra I. Jabra, ‘The Palestinian Exile as Writer’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 8.2 (1979), 77–87 and Suha Sabbagh, ‘Palestinian Women Writers and the Intifada’, Social Text, 22 (1989), 62–78. 23 This study forms part of the discussion in their article. 24 Therese Saliba, ‘Liana Badr’s Writings of the Palestinian Diaspora’, in Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, eds Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 132–61, p. 134. All further reference to this work will appear in the text.

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25 Saliba’s article places Badr’s texts in the wider context of the various Palestinian struggles for liberation. This is not what I am contesting; rather, I want to offer a textual reading that will engage fully with the narrow experience within the camp itself in order to negotiate the various relationships and how they are enacted under the circumstances that the reader is privy to. 26 Rosemary Sayigh, ‘Researching Gender in a Palestinian Camp: Political, Theoretical and Methodological Problems’, in Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), pp. 145–68 (p. 148). 27 Brinda J. Mehta, ‘The Mothers of the Intifada in Liana Badr’s The Eye of the Mirror’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102.4 (2003), 809–23 (p. 811). 28 For an overview of the role of music in the construction of Palestine see Joseph Massad, ‘Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 32.3 (2003), 21–38. 29 It is important to note here that the songs sung form part of the discourse of Palestine. Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg have convincingly argued for a move away from the study of popular culture as reflective of national and political concerns and a move towards its constitutive role. See ‘Popular Culture, Relational History, and the Question of Power in Palestine and Israel’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 33.4 (2004), 5–20. See also Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg (eds), Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 30 For example, posters of martyrs, continuously displayed, endlessly remind the viewer of the cycle of death implicit in the maintenance of ‘Palestine’. ‘Martyrs are the public figures through which the process of legitimisation takes place and which allows the makers and hangers to act on behalf of the public with unchallenged authority’, in Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, ‘On the Visual Representation of Martyrdom in Palestine’, Third Text, 20. (2006), 391–403 (p. 399). 31 Ibid., p. 400. It is worth noting that posters of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) fighters or martyrs do not include quotes from the Qur’an, ibid., p. 399. 32 Tina Sherwell, ‘Topographies of Identities, Soliloquies of Space’, Third Text, 20 (2006), 429–43 (p. 429). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 33 Kamal Boullata, ‘Artists Re-member Palestine in Beirut’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 32.4 (2003), 22–38 (p. 23). 34 Ibid., p. 25. Boullata writes specifically on Isma’il Shammout, Mustafa al-Hallaj, Naji al-’Ali and Ibrahim Ghannam. 35 Ibid., p. 27. 36 ‘Take for example’, Sherwell continues, ‘those who experienced the exodus in 1948 as opposed to those who have been reared on its narratives. The experience, an understanding of the original site and the ensuing exodus, will differ critically from those who have only heard the story’ (p. 430). 37 Hamida Na’na, The Homeland, trans. Martin Asser (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1979; 1995), p. 19. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 38 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 40. 39 Ibid., p. 36. 40 Ibid., p. 10. 41 Here ‘turmeric’ is used to indicate a sickly yellow pallor. 42 Salwa Bakr, The Golden Chariot, trans. Dinah Manistry (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1991; 1995), p. 29. All further refences to this work will appear in the text. 43 Barbara Harlow, ‘In the Golden Chariot Things Will Be Better’, Boundary, 2 (1992), 150–62 (p. 152). Here, Harlow provides her own translation of the text in an excerpt. 44 El Saadawi’s protagonist in Woman at Point Zero encounters similar discrepancies beween what she expects of herself and what is expected of her. 45 Harlow, ‘In the Golden Chariot Things Will Be Better’, p. 151. 46 I found much of the criticism of Bakr keen to relate her fiction to her outspoken feminist concerns. Whilst I am alert of Bakr’s work and opinion on the injustices that

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

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many women live under, The Golden Chariot is not merely a mouthpiece for cut and dried polemicism but attempts to reveal strategies at work for women who find themselves in intolerable situations. Lucie Ryzova, ‘‘‘ I am a Whore but Will Be a Good Mother’’: On the Production and Consumption of the Female Body in Modern Egypt’, Arab Studies Journal (Fall 2004/ Spring 2005), 80–122 (p. 88). For more on madness as a strategy, see Dinah Manisty, ‘Madness as Textual Strategy in the Narratives of Three Egyptian Women Writers’, Alif, 14 (1994), 152–74. As it is discursively contructed in the society in which they live. Magda M. Al-Nowaihi, ‘Revisioning National Community in Salwa Bakr’s The Golden Chariot Does not Ascend to Heaven’, Arab Studies Journal (Fall 1999/Spring 2000), 8–24 (p. 13). All further references to this work will appear in the text. Al-Nowaihi cites Bakr, p. 134. Caroline Seymour-Jorn, ‘In the Golden Chariot Things Will Be Better’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 11.2 (2002), 151–76 (p. 151). See this article for an extensive discussion on Bakr’s linguistic experimentation. Hoda El-Sadda, ‘Women’s Writing in Egypt: Reflections on Salwa Bakr’, in Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), pp. 127–44 (p. 128). Ibid., p. 134. See El-Sadda’a article for a highly informative view of Bakr’s work in the context of Egyptian women’s writing. Ibid., p. 140. Caroline Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 37. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 44. What Rooney has called ‘the unlegitimised law of literature’, ibid., p. 59. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 3. An analysis of all of the female characters in the novel under this rubric reveals a broad range of personal reflections that is very useful in understanding the level of sacrifice and reflection on that sacrifice. I have here attempted to look at one example only. I do not discuss Hoda Barakat’s novel The Stone of Laughter here, though I hope to engage with it in a future publication. For critical responses to Barakat’s novel, see: Samira Aghacy, ‘Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter: Androgyny or Polarization’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 29.3/4 (1998), 185–201; Lamia Rustum Shehadeh (ed.), Women and War in Lebanon (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999); Elise Salem, Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003); and Mona Fayad, ‘Strategic Androgyny: Passing as Masculine in Barakat’s Stone of Laughter’, in Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, eds Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 162–79. The Arabic title is Habbat al-Naphataline which translates as napthalene balls or mothballs. Farida Abu-Haidar, ‘A Voice from Iraq: the Fiction of Alia Mamdouh’. Inside cover, Alia Mamdouh, Mothballs, trans. Peter Theroux (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1986; 1996). Inside cover, Alia Mamdouh, Napthalene: A Novel of Baghdad, trans. Peter Theroux (New York: The Feminist Press, 2005). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, eds Miche`le Barrett and Anne Phillips (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 177–200 (p. 189). All further references will appear in the text. Inside cover, Alia Mamdouh, Mothballs. Inside cover, Alia Mamdouh, Napthalene: A Novel of Baghdad. Fadia Faqir, ‘Introduction’, Alia Mamdouh, Mothballs, trans. Peter Theroux (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1996), p. ix.

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5 Ahlam Mosteghanemi and Ahdaf Soueif: ‘physical textures’ and ‘exceptional events’ 1 ‘Exceptional events’ is a term used in Mosteghanemi’s novel that I discuss below and ‘physical textures’ is a description that I have taken from Caroline Seymour-Jorn’s article ‘View from the Margin: Writer Ni’mat al-Bihiri on Gender Issues in Egypt’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 13.1 (2004), 77–95 (p. 82). 2 Caroline Seymour-Jorn, ‘View from the Margin’. 3 Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh, trans. Baria Ahmar Sreih (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 4 I have chosen to spell Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s name as it is spelled in the American University in Cairo Press edition. All name spellings used are from this version. Spelling of names will appear differently when cited from other articles. 5 Inside jacket of the American University in Cairo Press edition. 6 Ellen McLarney, ‘Unlocking the Female in Ahlam Mustaghanami’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 23.1 (2002), 24–44 (p. 25). 7 Aı¨da A. Bamia, ‘Dhakirat al-jasad (The Body’s Memory): A New Outlook on Old Themes’, Research in African Literaratures, 28.3 (1997), 85–93. 8 Ibid., p. 85. 9 Ibid., p. 87. 10 McLarney, ‘Unlocking the Female in Ahlam Mustaghanami’, p. 24. 11 Bamia, ‘Dhakirat al-jasad’, p. 86. Here, Bamia reminds us of the critical work on El Saadawi by Georges Tarabishi entitled Woman Against her Sex, where he argues that El Saadawi fails to construct positive images for women and instead reproduces negative, dysfunctional stereotypes. 12 This is the Arabic title of the book which both Bamia and McLarney use in their respective articles. 13 Ellen McLarney, ‘Unlocking the Female in Ahlam Mustaghanami’, p. 25. It is possible to argue that in fact there is a very audible female voice in the text; whether that is a feminine voice, is open to debate. 14 Ibid., p. 25. 15 See Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization and Literatures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Chapter 2, ‘Wild Femininty and Historical Countermemory’ is particularly useful on this point. 16 Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb, p. 57. Italics in the original. 17 The Kabyles come from an area in the northern mountains of Algeria. 18 See Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb, p. 57. In a strange coincidence, the recently successful erotic novel The Almond is written by an anonymous author whose nom de plume is Nedjma. 19 In this sense, Mosteghanemi’s project is very different to Francophone Algerian novelist Assia Djebar’s, which deals directly with the histories and effects of colonisation and is concerned with recuperation of a feminine history and language. 20 Jane Hiddlestone, Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), p. 80. 21 Caroline Seymour-Jorn, ‘View from the Margin’, p. 82. Here, Seymour-Jorn is discussing Naguib Mahfouz. 22 Ibid., p. 82 23 This phrase is used by Khaled in the novel and is one that I shall return to in my discussion. 24 A concern for McLarney in ‘Unlocking the Female in Ahlam Mustaghanami’, p. 32. 25 Mosteghanemi’s critical writing is used by McLarney as a frame against which to position the creative works. Whilst this can reveal interesting results, it makes their alignments too neat and effectively cancels out the complexity of the novel.

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26 A paragraph on page 23 is dedicated to her name Ahlam, the name that her father chooses for her. It is typical of a lover’s game and intended, I believe, to provide that intensity. 27 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 9–11. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 28 Khaled avoids returning to Algeria though he is constantly asked back by both family members and government officials. 29 McLarney, ‘Unlocking the Female in Ahlam Mustaghanami’, p. 25. 30 If we were reading Ahlam’s narrative rather than Khaled’s, would we be so quick to judge her metaphorising? 31 Bamia, ‘Dhakirat al-jasad’, p. 86. 32 Ibid., p. 88. 33 McLarney, ‘Unlocking the Female in Ahlam Mustaghanami’, p. 33. 34 Ibid., p. 40. 35 Bamia, ‘Dhakirat al-jasad’, pp. 89–90. 36 It is surprising to me that this, in a sense, refutation of Jameson still needs to be made in order to proceed with alernatives. Yet, when critiques of postcolonial literatures consolidate this view, a counterview requires a repetition of the disavowal, once again. 37 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 4. 38 Ibid., p. 4. 39 Ibid., p. 6. 40 Maria Letizia Alerterno is currently undertaking research on the work of Raja Rao, whose novels many have found difficult to disassemble due to the sheer quantity of intertextual referencing. Though this is not strictly speaking what Soueif does, there is a certain proficiency demanded of the reader (who can always choose to ignore this demand, of course). 41 Ahdad Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun (London: Bloomsbury, 1992). All further references to this work will appear in the text. Particularly tense scenes are broken up into hours, see pages 540, 543, 576, 577, 582 for some examples. This technique allows for the temporal shift to impact on the significance of the events without a discernible pattern, but nevertheless with discernible effect. 42 Joseph Massad, ‘The Politics of Desire in the Writing of Ahdaf Soueif ’, Journal of Palestinian Studies, 28.4 (1999), 74–90 (p. 75). 43 Amin Malak, ‘Arab-Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity: The Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif ’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 20 (2000), 140–65 (p. 148). 44 Malak suggests that this is something to celebrate, whereas it seems that there are more questions asked than answered in Soueif ’s narrative. 45 Malak points out that ‘Saif Madi’ suggestively translates as ‘piercing sword’, p. 149. 46 Though Asya does think of Gerald in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love on page 196, just before her engagement. 47 Samia Serageldin, ‘Reflections and Refractions: Arab American Women Writing and Written’, Hawwa, 1:2 (2003), 189–205 (p. 197). For Susan Muaddi Darraj in ‘Narrating England and Egypt: the Hybrid Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif ’, Studies in the Humanities, 30.1–2 (2003), 97–108, Gerald Stone, with whom Asya has an affair, is mysteriously described as an ‘American’, not once, but twice. Gerald Stone is English. 48 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 189. Though I am aware that Butler speaks of these exclusions operating on a psychoanalytic level and finds this inspiring, it might be more productive here to analyse the symptoms rather than reveal the complex processes that generate them. 49 The marriage is only consummated much later, and in a violent manner. 50 For example, see p. 392 and p. 453 for particularly fraught scenes. 51 Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 191.

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52 , ‘‘‘Also I wanted so much to leave for the West’’: Postcolonial Feminism Rides the Third Wave’, in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, eds Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 198–211. 53 Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 32. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 54 I have discussed energy in this context in Anastasia Valassopoulos, ‘The Legacy of Orientalism in Middle Eastern Feminism’, in After Orientalism, ed. Inge Boer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 183–99. 55 For an antithetical perspective, see Darraj, ‘Narrating England and Egypt: The Hybrid Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif ’, for an argument that does celebrate the ‘liberation’ of Asya: ‘By the end, Asya understands that the integrity of her narrative is threatened not only by orientalism, but also by gender inequities within both Western and Eastern cultures. With this realisation, she seizes full control of her narrative, thus articulating her hybridised identity’ (p. 98). 6 Re-exoticising the Orient 1 Charles Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism’, Paragraph, 24.3 (2001), 12–29 (p. 15). 2 Ibid., p. 27, note 13. 3 Sebbar would not call herself an Arab writer. For more on this, see Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 4 I have borrowed this term from Michael O’Riley’s illuminating article entitled ‘Specters of Orientalism in France, Algeria, and Postcolonial Studies’, Mosaic, 34.4 (2001), 47–64. 5 Ibid., p. 48. 6 This echoes the logic of Butler’s Excitable Speech, where she argues that certain formulations, in their repetition, reproduce that which a more progressive discourse is attempting to overcome. 7 O’Riley, ‘Specters of Orientalism’, p. 48. 8 Ibid., p. 50. 9 Ibid., p. 51. It might be possible to say that this is the return of the repressed, but this would prioritise a colonialist/orientalist practice in postcolonial studies. 10 Ibid., p. 54. This is a topical issue, judging by several recent articles that I engage with in this book that seem to be evaluating the novels precisely in terms of their supposed success/failure in projecting an anti-colonial spirit. Whilst I think this is an energetic attempt to validate the purposefulness of those books, I would not want to see this paradigm become the predominant one. See, for example, recent work on Ahdaf Soueif ’s The Map of Love. 11 Charles Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 12. All further references to this work will appear in the text. Reference to other works by this author will appear in the notes. 12 O’Riley, ‘Specters of Orientalism’, p. 62. 13 I first came across the term ‘postcolonial orientalism’ in Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb, p. 111. 14 Here Forsdick refers to the work of Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics on Diversity, trans. and ed. Yae¨l Rachel Schlick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 15 Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 71. 16 Charles Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 18. 17 Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, p. 71. 18 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 20. 19 Forsdick, ibid., p. 25.

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20 I have written about this and other related topics in Anastasia Valassopoulos, ‘Fictionalising Post-colonial Theory: The Creative Native Informant?’ Critical Survey, 16.2 (2004), 28–44. This article also engages more widely with Graham Huggan’s work The Postcolonial Exotic. 21 This will perhaps require Anglophone postcolonial critics and theorists to look again at the value of the concept of exoticism. 22 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 25. 23 I will return to this assertion as I do not want it to appear as though the exoticisation of orientalism is not problematic. Charles Forsdick makes a claim for exoticism as a mode of resitance in Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Culture, p. 46. 24 O’Riley, ‘Specters of Orientalism’, p. 51. 25 Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 2. 26 Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Culture, p. 46. 27 Forsdick cites Segalen’s list of exotica: the tropics, coconut trees, camels, scents, spices, enchanted islands, etc., in ibid., p. 39. 28 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978; 1995), p. 21. 29 See Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001) Though Huggan writes on contemporary postcolonial literature, it is not too difficult to see how more popular fiction participates in the same system. 30 Alev Lytle Croutier, Leyla: The Black Tulip (Middletone, WI: Pleasant Company Publications: 2003), p. 189. 31 Dora Levy Mossanen, Harem: A Novel (New York and London: Simon and Schuster, 2002), p. 382. 32 Odalisque by Mariano Fortuny on the cover of The Palace of Tears, and In the Harem by Jean Jules Antoine Lecomte du Nouy on the cover of Harem. 33 Croutier, The Palace of Tears (London: Hutchinson, 2000) p. 87. 34 Ibid., p. 3. 35 From Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Culture, p. 39, who cites Segalen’s formulation. 36 Belinda Jack, ‘Strategies of Transgression in the Writings of Assia Djebar’, in Essays on African Writing 2: Contemporary Literature, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1995), pp. 21, 29. 37 Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, trans. Marjolijn de Jager, Afterword, Clarisse Zimra (Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press, 1980; 1992), p. 137. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 38 Jane Hiddlestone, Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), p. 65. 39 Suzanne Gauch, Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 86. 40 Inge E. Boer, Disorienting Vision: Rereading Stereotypes in French Orientalist Texts and Images, ed. Mieke Bal (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004) All further references to this work will appear in the text. 41 Denise deCaires Narain, ‘What Happened to Global Sisterhood? Writing and Reading ‘‘the’’ Postcolonial Woman’, in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, eds Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 240–51 (p. 249). 42 Marnia Lazreg and Winifred Woodhull do not seem overly convinced of the usefulness of returning to Delacroix. 43 Interestingly, Boer, in her work Disorienting Vision, casts doubt on Delacroix’s story when she writes that ‘Delacroix does not mention this visit in his travel notes or in his correspondence with friends. We have only a second-hand account, written 50 years later, by a Monsieur Cournault, who has himself not been present at the occasion’ (p. 92).

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44 Leila Sebbar, Sherazade: Missing: Aged 17, Dark Curly Hair, Green Eyes, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Quartet Books, 1982; 1991), p. 1. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 45 Gauch, Liberating Shahrazad, p. 112. 46 O’Riley, ‘Specters of Orientalism’, p. 51. 47 Gauch, Liberating Shahrazad, pp. 114–15. 48 Euge`ne Fromentin, Between Sea and Sahara: An Orientalist Adventure, trans. Blake Robinson (1859; London: I. B. Tauris, 2004) and Pierre Loti, The Sahara, trans. Marjorie Laurie (1895; London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd, 1930). 49 Jarrod Hayes, Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 221. 50 Ibid., p. 223. 51 Ibid., pp. 226, 228. 52 Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb, p. 111. 53 Hayes, Queer Nations, p. 231. 54 Franc¸oise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 167 55 Ibid., p. 168. 56 Anne Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (Portsmouth: Heineman, 2001), p. 108. 57 Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb, p. 115. 58 Boer, Disorienting Vision, p. 101.

Index

Abu-Haidar, F. 86–90, 109. Abu Hashhash, M. 79, 97. Abu-Lughod, L.: Arab feminism 15–19; modernity 23, 26. Accad, E. 9, 57, 65–66. Adnan, E. 60. Ahmed, L. 17, 23. Ahmed, S. 34, 37, 50, 117–19, 121–22. Al-Nowaihi, M.: on Salwa Bakr 106. Al-Shaykh, H., 2, 4, 55–56, 59–60; Beirut Blues 68–69, 72–73, 75, 82–83; The Story of Zahra 64–66. Amireh, A. 2, 8; comments on publishing 23–25, 32, 84, 109; new directions in criticism 3, 27–29, 33, 60. Arab feminism 3, 13, 15–16, 22; El Saadawi and Arab feminism 32, 38. Armbrust, W. 25. Badr, L. 2, 5, 57; The Eye of the Mirror 91– 94, 97. Badran, M. 13, 15. Bakr, S. 5, 88; The Golden Chariot 102–9. Bamia, A. 112, 121, 123. Butler, J. 35, 37, 39, 58, 62, 128; on Antigone 107–9; from Excitable Speech 48–50; performativity 19–20. Cixous, H. 87, 109. colonial discourse 4, 22, 30, 99, 138–39. Cooke, M. 23, 28; on feminism 9–12, 15, 27; on writers of the Lebanese war 55, 58–60, 64, 66. Cotter, S.: photography in Beirut 62. Dados, N. 70. Darraj, S. 132. death drive: and war 67, 71–72, 84.

Djebar, A. 2, 6, 114–15, 133; on Arab women’s writing 40–41, on Woman at Point Zero 48, 53; Women of Algiers in their Apartment 136, 138–40, 142–47, 151. Dunwoodie, P. 137. El Guindi, F. 22–23. El Saadawi, N. 1, 2, 4, 9, 12, 16; Amal Amireh on Nawal El Saadawi 23–24, 28–29; Memoirs of a Woman Doctor 31– 33, 39, 42, 44, 46–47; Two Women in One 32, 39, 44–47, 52; Woman at Point Zero 32, 34, 36, 40–41, 43, 45–47, 53. El-Sadda, H. 107. Fadda-Conrey, C. 60. Faqir, F. 5, 9; introducing Garnet Arab Women Writer series 86–87, 90–91, 110. Fayad, M. 60, 80. female militias, 79–81. feminist theory 10, 12, 14, 21, 27, 39; postcolonial feminist theory 17, 34, 36, 23, 93; third world feminism 21–22, 30, 33–34, 36, 53. Forsdick, C.: French postcolonial theory and concepts 134, 136–39. Francophone Algerian literature, 113, 134, 136, 138. Gauch, S. 3, 145, 147–48. Ghandour, S.: on Al-Shaykh 65. Ghoussoub, M. 2, 4, 55–56, 59–60, 68; Women and the Wars Within 69, 71–84. Gilligan, C. 11–12. Grace, D. 31, 34. Grewal, I. and Caren K. 41, 53. Hafez, S. 23. Hassan, S..25, 26.

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Hatem, M. 13–14, 16. Hayes, J. 149–50. Hayward, M. 6. heroes, 80, 100–101. Hiddlestone, J. 32, 114, 145. Innes, L. 44. intifada, 94, 98. Kadhim, H. 87, 90–91. Kandiyoti, D. 30. Kattan, J. 92–93. Kawar, S. 88; on the ethics of translation 89–90. Lane, C.: psychological effects of war 64. Laplanche, J. 67, 71–72. Leila Khaled, 61–62, 80, 98. Loomba, A. 30. Majaj et al. 8, 9, 24, 28–30. Malak, A. 24, 126, 127. Malek Alloula, 135. Malti-Douglas, F. 20; on Nawal El Saadawi 23–24, 34, 58; on Arab social thought and western influences 24–25, 26. Mamdouh, A. 5; on Nawal El Saadawi 23–24; Mothballs 109–10. Manisty, D. 88. martyrs, 75–79. martyrdom posters, 79, 83, 97. masochism, 66–68, 84. Mason, P. 139. Massad, J. 125, 127. McLarney, E. 112–13, 118, 122. McNay, L.: gender and agency 129, 132. Mehta, B. 3, 94. Mernissi, F. 22. modernism 18, 25, 36; postmodernism 36. Moghissi, H. 15, 18–20. Mohan, R.: on militant activity and feminist theory 14, 16, 57; on Leila Khaled 61–62, 82. Mohanty, C. 33–34, 41. Moore, L. 3. Mosteghanemi, A. 2, 5; Memory in the Flesh 111–24.

Na’na, H. 2, 5, 88; The Homeland 92, 96, 98, 100–101. Narain, deCaires, D. 146. O’Riley, M.: orientalism in Francophone studies 134–35, 139, 147. popular culture 3, 23, 25, 37, 95, 104. popular harem tales, 140–42. Pontalis, J.B. and Laplanche, J. 67. postcolonial studies and Arabic literary studies 25. Probyn, E. 44. prostitute: role of 33, 35, 40, 48–53. Rashid, F. 58. Riley,D. 11. Rooney, C. 31, 34, 107–9. Roy, K. n.56. Ryzova, L.: Egyptian popular culture 104. Saliba, T. 2, 24, 28, 29–30, 33, 41; on Liana Badr 92–93. Sebbar, L. 2, 6, 133, 136, 131–41; Sherazade 142, 147–54. Seymour-Jorn, C. 107, 114. Sherwell, T. 97–98. Soueif, A. 2, 5, 111, 124; on Nawal El Saadawi 23–24, In the Eye of the Sun 124-132. Spivak, G. 30, 36–37, 42, 133; sati 76; on issues of translation 109–10. Stone, C.: baalbek festivals and Fairuz, 63. strangers in postcoloniality 117, 119–21. subaltern 30, 36, 42, 76. tarab 81–82. Tymoczko, M. 85. Valassopoulos, A. 171, n.54, 172, n.20, 157, n.39, 159, n.8. Woodhull, W. 22, 113, 150. Zeidan, J. 9–10, 12.