Huda Shaarawi is at center.

Clearly, it’s time to take a hard look at gender relations.

I have a piece in Al Masry Al Youm today that looks at different strands of Egyptian feminism (and alternatives to feminism) through the lens of women’s memoirs and novels. It particularly examines the following books:

Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, by Huda Shaarawi, trans. Margot Badran

Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories, by Alifa Rifaat, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies

Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, Nawal al-Saadawi, trans. Marilyn Booth

The Golden Chariot, Salwa Bakr, trans. Dinah Manisty

The Tent, Miral al-Tahawy, trans. Anthony Calderbank

The first modern Egyptian feminists—like Shaarawi and her compatriot Safia Zaghloul—could indeed be an inspiration to women today, as their activism was born in the cauldron of nationalist struggle against a corrupt and illegal (colonial) regime. Other women writers, such as Alifa Rifaat and Miral al-Tahawy, offer other ways to approach female characters and gender constructs. Ghada Abdel Aal’s I Want to Get Married! also presents a different way forward.

Read on here.

And, since clearly we need a strong dose of women authors, I’ll suggest other books by seven strong Egyptian women writers as gifts for the men and women you know:

Latifa al-Zayyat (1923-1966), The Open Door

Radwa Ashour, (1946 – ), Specters

Ahdaf Soueif, (1950 – ), In the Eye of the Sun

Amina Zaydan, (1966 – ), Red Wine

Iman Mersal, (1966 – ), These Are Not Oranges, My Love

Mansoura Ezz Eldin, (1976 – ), Maryam’s Maze

Ghada Abdel Aal (1978 – ), I Want to Get Married!

And Forthcoming:

So You May See, by Mona Prince (1970 – ), translated by Raphael Cohen. The promotional text promises, “Passion, unconventional romance, and the determination of a strong female character to live her life freely.” April 2011, AUC Press.

This list came out earlier in the month, but it didn’t occur to me  that any of the women on Arabian Business’s rundown of the “100 most powerful Arab women of 2011” might be novelists or poets.

But there are a few authors, tucked in here and there.

As one would expect, most of the magazine’s “influential” are simply wealthy businesspeople, politicians, or pop stars. As Nesrin Malik noted over at The Guardian, the list is a conservative one. I don’t think the magazine’s co-ed “Power 100 2011″ has come out yet, but the list will be meaningless if Prince alSaud isn’t bumped from No. 1 by Mohammed Bouazizi. And on the list of 100 influential Arab women, where is Khaled Said’s mother, Laila Marzouk?

In any case, the five authors selected by Arabian Business are:

No. 26 Rajaa Al Sanea USA/Saudi Arabia
No. 30 Liana Badr Palestine
No.31 Fatema Mernissi Morocco
No. 43 Leila Abouzeid Morocco
No. 63 Nathalie Handal New York/Paris/Palestine

I don’t question that Leila Abouzeid is a fine author. But is she one of the five most influential female authors of Arab descent in 2010-2011? If so…why?

I’m not sure how Arabian Business assesses such things—I don’t see any reference to their selection process—but they could use the criteria of number of books sold. (Since there isn’t reliable data, my guess at some top bestsellers: Ahlam Mostaghanemi, Ahdaf Soueif, Hanan al-Shaykh, Salwa Al Neimi)

They could look at number of groupies at literary events. (Ahlam Mostaghanemi)

Number of other writers trying to imitate their book. (Ghada Abdel Aal would be a candidate here; so would Raja Alsanea)

Most frequently mentioned for Nobel Prize in Literature. (Assia Djebar)

Most politically prominent. (Ahdaf Soueif)

Most celebrated in Western university curricula. (I’d guess Hanan al-Shaykh and Nawal al Saadawi)

Most popular according to a Maktoob/Yahoo survey. (Nawal al Saadawi and Ahlam Mostaghanemi)

Most award-winning children’s book and YA author. (Fatima Sharafeddine.)

Most able to get themselves talked about. (Joumana Haddad. Update: Today, the New York Times refers to her as the “Oprah of Lebanon” in a piece entitled…uh, “Sex and the Souq.”)

Women whose books are ranked near the top of the “top 100 Arabic books list,” as voted by the Arab writers union. (Ghada Samman, Ahlam Mostaghanemi, Hanan al-Shaykh)

Other women on the “top 100″ list. (Laila al-Othman, Radwa Ashour, Sahar Khalifeh, Fawzia Rasheed, Emily Nasrallah, Lily Osseiran, Salwa Bakr, and Latifa Al-Zayat)

Mostaghanemi also tweets and has at least 201,395 “likers” on Facebook.

Other lists of “most influential Arab women”:

Nesrin Malik did an alternative list at The Guardian. She tops her list with Nawal al-Saadawi.

Thanks to Laila Lalami for pointing out that I missed Fatima Mernissi.

Raja Alsanea, often praised/blamed for starting it all with her novel Girls of Riyadh.

Anglos have long been charged by a belief in Arab (hyper)sexuality. As Edward Said nods at in his pioneering Orientalism, this is in large part because of Anglo (hyper)reserve about s-e-x. Indeed, we might just as well talk about why Anglo writers can’t properly describe sex in their novels, and what they might learn from Saudi women.

This is in part because Saudis, Madawi al-Rasheed argues in The New Significance, have a history of healthy sex talk. Reserved Anglo women would be shocked by the talk of (married) Saudi women, she says, as Saudis “go in for elaborate ‘sexual’ talk.”

However, the sex talk doesn’t end there. It also, less healthily, extends to strict religious and government regulations. Al-Rasheed cites an elaborate “erotic theology,” through which scholars circulate how-to sex manuals and answer sex questions live on television.

And in the last decade, sex talk has found its way into young women’s novels.

Yes, the topic has been titillating for Anglo news editors. But also for Arab readers. According to the Oman Tribune, “London-based Saudi writer Zeinab Hifni’s latest novel Wesadat Le Hubbiki or the ‘Pillow for Your Love‘…is the talk of the [2011 Muscat International Book] fair.”

And why not? The novel, published by Al-Saqi, is one of a number of well-known Saudi women’s novels that talk about sex, international travel, and shopping. Are these novels revolutionary or reactionary? Are they good literature or neocapitalist fantasy?

Madawi al-Rasheed quotes novelist Badriya al-Bishr as saying that sexual themes in the new Saudi lit are just…sexual themes. Contemporary Arab literature, al-Bishr said, “is saturated with sexual scenes but critics do not concern themselves with this. Only when Saudi women write about sex, they are singled out.”

Saudi reporter Sabria Jawhar wrote about the issue in Arabisto last year:

Female authors like Al Bishr and Al Gohani may never cross gender lines and be embraced for their work as writers and not just women. But that matters less than the fact they are reaching a female Saudi audience who may be inspired to reach beyond domestic life for a larger piece of the pie.

Obviously, we’ve written about this too much already:

The New Saudi Novel (Again): Rebellious Pamphlet or Artistic Revolution?

The ‘Tyranny of Sex’ in the Saudi Novel

Laila al-Othman: Too Much Sex in New Saudi (Women’s) Lit

Although there’s probably no harm in this one:

A Primer on Saudi Lit, Abdulrahman Munif to Present

This is what you win if you get the Orange prize. Well, this and £30,000.

Yesterday, I noted that the big controversy (so far) in the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF, “Arabic Booker”) longlist is its surfeit of women.

I quoted Susannah Tarbush: “Complaints about the low representation of women in a literary prize are hardly unique to IPAF or the Arab world: it was unhappiness about a perceived male dominance of the Booker Prize that led to the launching in the UK in 1996 of the Orange Prize for fiction by women.”

And asked: Should there be an Orange Prize for women who write novels in Arabic? And added: A question for another day.

Another day has come, as good as any for exploring the question of gender equity. First, we’ll 1) set aside whether literary prizes are a positive thing for fiction and for human culture and assume that they are. Then we’ll 2) even set aside the question of who funds these literary prizes, and why, and what they hope to gain.

We’ll only ask: Would having an “IPAF for Girls” (the most derogatory interpretation) support Arabic-writing women novelists or ghettoize them?

British novelist A.S. Byatt is one of many who criticize the prize. She said in The Guardian, of the Orange: “The Orange prize is a sexist prize. You couldn’t found a prize for male writers. The Orange prize assumes there is a feminine subject matter – which I don’t believe in. It’s honourable to believe that – there are fine critics and writers who do – but I don’t.”

Orange Prize judge Michèle Roberts is, in the other camp, one of many who defend it. She argued in The Independent that the prize is “good for women writers.”

She added:

Some women novelists angrily felt that gender should not be the focus in this way; that they would be pushed back into the old camp of “women writers”, labelled and patronised as separate, different and therefore second-rate. Some male critics resented even having to think about gender at all, scornfully denying that women writers had ever been discriminated against and certainly shouldn’t get special treatment. They fulminated that if women wanted equality, dammit, then they should compete equally with the chaps. Some people, myself among them, liked the idea of the French Prix Femina style of prize: an all-female panel of judges sifting novels by both men and women.

But apparently similar problems in the Anglo, French and Arabic-writing worlds are no reason we should call for similarly patchy solutions. There are surely more creative answers to the question of how we can support women’s creative endeavors.

But back to our question: What about the prize(s)?

I don’t know why there are fewer women on the Anglo Booker lists. But I do believe that part of the reason for the relative absence of women writers on the IPAF long and shortlists (with the exception of 2011) is almost certainly not the judges’ “fault,” but a lack of women-authored titles submitted by publishers. I say almost certainly because the names of the submitted titles are kept secret, as prize administrator Fleur Montanaro puts is, partly so that authors who are not nominated “don’t lose face, as such.”

But this secrecy also serves to shroud publishers’ role in supporting or suppressing their women (or experimental, or popular, or funny, or serious) writers.

Certainly publishers should submit their “best titles” with no thought to whether they’re by men or women. But what does “best” mean, anyway? Publishers must submit with an angle on what they think will win: More “Western-friendly” titles? More mannish titles? More serious? Historical? Topical?

Last year—before the 2010 “gender-even” longlist was released—I had asked leading Arabic-literature scholar Dr. Samia Mehrez if she gave any credence to complaints that women were underrepresented on the IPAF lists:

Yes, I would give credence to that, considering that there are enough women writers in the region to merit [a presence on the list].

I think it would be fair to say that one should expect women on that shortlist, because the literary production by women…is such that they merit not just one, but also they deserve to be represented by more than one.

I would also like to take a moment to put paid to the misapprehension that Europeans are primarily interested in Arab women writers. There is a strong belief that Arabic literature in translation is overwhelmingly female, and that Westerners are going out of their way to translate (exclusively) women writers. What Youssef al-Bazzi wrote in Banipal 36 (“We can state here that there is not a single Arab woman writer, regardless of the quality of her literary writing, who has not met with European deference, translation, or ‘presence.’”) is just not borne out by the percentages of Arab women writers in translation. Sorry.

Now, do Western publishers look for a certain sort of “Western-liberationist” women’s writing? Perhaps. But that hardly helps the funny, bold Ghada Abdel Aals or the thoughtful, experimental Radwa Ashours of the world.

But, for the moment, who cares what Western publishers like. Do Arabic-language readers want to support Arab women writers? Let’s say yes, why not, a more diverse reading experience benefits us all. Would a prize like the Orange support or hobble Arab women writers?

(Or both?)

Responses on Twitter:

dabujaber Diana Abu Jaber: it’s hard for women writers in any language, including English, I favor anything that helps bring them recognition.

@kohlpublishing kohlpublishing: Given the rise in book sales for an Orange Prize winner, an Arab Writers prize would make the winners much better known in UK.

From the march, photo by Sarah Carr.

In celebration of yesterday’s women’s march  (and its male supporters, who I’m sure will happily read women) I wanted to mention a few new works by Egypt’s revolutionary women writers and translators.

Sarah Carr: Sarah doesn’t yet have a book out, but she blogs at Inanities, where you can read both her biting satire and her vibrant reportage.

Ahdaf Soueif: Egypt’s award-winning novelist has been writing about Egypt’s struggle toward freedom and justice on The Guardian since Jan. 27.  Her memoir about the initial days of the revolution, interwoven with scenes from her childhood (Cairo: My City, Our Revolution), will be out next month from Bloomsbury.

Miral al-Tahawy and revolutionary translator Samah Selim: Miral’s Brooklyn Heights, which was shortlisted for last year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won last year’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, is out this month from AUC Press.

Mansoura Ez Eldin and revolutionary translator Wiam El-Tamami: You can read Mansoura Ez Eldin’s “Gothic Night” on Granta, in award-winning translation by El-Tamami. El-Tamami is also a very promising young writer: You can read her revolution diaries on Granta,  and her vivid “A Taste of Four Cities” was selected as a winner of the EuroMed “Sea of Stories” contest.

Iman Mersal and revolutionary non-woman translator Khaled Mattawa: Mersal’s These are not Oranges, My Love, came out in long-ago 2008, but you should still read it.

Also out now:

Mai Khaled’s The Magic of Turquoise, trans. Marwa Elnaggar:  Elnagger tells me: “just got my copies hot off the press last Thursday, but I don’t know if it’s in the stores yet.”

Reem Bassiouney’s Professor Hanaa, trans. Laila Helmi came out last month. I haven’t gotten a copy, but you can read an excerpt here, and it’ reviewed on the non-woman M.A. Orthofer’s Literary Saloon.

Forthcoming:

Revolutionary author Radwa Ashour’s Farag was recently signed on by Bloomsbury Qatar. I don’t know the translator yet, but here’s hoping it will be a revolutionary woman.

ArabLit contributor Mona Elnamoury reflects on what Kate Chopin would’ve gained from the International Prize for Arabic Fiction-sponsored “nadwas,” or writers’ retreats, and what a modern Arab  ”Kate Chopin” needs to write and publish.

I have always thought of her amidst her six children, trying to write on a wooden board in the kitchen. With servants and perhaps slaves in the house, a mother of six was surely busy-minded enough to think of writing as a miraculous activity; even servants needed guidance. However, 19th century American writer Kate Chopin produced surprisingly fresh and genuine fiction that has recently been rediscovered and widely studied. Chopin’s busy married life and her active social life in the small town Cloutierville surely provided her with rich material for her work but it must have also eaten up much of the energy and time that would otherwise have been directed to more reading, writing and editing. With her husband’s death leaving her a plantation and a store deeply in debt, Chopin’s cares and burdens definitely increased.

One should not be deceived by what some of the biographies say about her widowed flirtatious life and come to the conclusion that the lady was simply gathering all the writing material she needed to start a controversial writing career. Her life seemed to be a continuous struggle towards finding a harmony between her inner life and her outward existence. Again, she still needed a great time for reflection, friction and literary exchange, the latter was perhaps almost impossible to get except through letters. Nadwa, the creative writing workshop funded by the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) was probably what Chopin needed most.

What could a fiery talent do alone? How would it survive the bitter critical standards and the natural reluctance of publishers to publish for women? I can imagine that hundreds of ideas must have flown through theLouisianaair before Chopin had time to reflect on them, not to say record them, and I can imagine the many stories that she never wrote influenced by the social censorship or restricted by the limits of time. I know as a fact that she destroyed the manuscript of a novel and that the condemnation of her most daring novel The Awakening overwhelmed her with final silence till her death.

Is there a better place for Chopin to go to than a writing workshop like the IPAF’s Nadwa? The Nadwa would give her a short seclusion away from the kids, but not too long lest things should go wrong back home, providing her with a chance to meet other promising aspiring writers, bestowing on her a blessing of close touch with new experiences of foreign countries and people, and finally committing her to ten days of serious creative outpouring away from distractions of any nature: financial, maternal, social or even sexual. But Nadwa was nowhere near creation when Chopin needed it!

How is the situation with a modern Middle Eastern Kate Chopin? Mmmm! Let us play a bit now. Perhaps she would have a smaller number of children, no servants, and a full-time job. She would have most of the modern communication tools, and supposedly more recognized freedom. The faster wider communication tools would provide her with the friction she needs at a distance but in return for that she would be overwhelmed with the unbelievably enormous number of daily updated sites to visit, groups interact with, events to attend and thousands of works and articles to read. How would she do that with the responsibility of the kids, house and work? The husband? If she is still married, the husband at best will be helpful up to a certain point where her work does not contradict his own work and career. At worst, he would oppose anything she does that will not lead to his and his kids’ welfare. In between, he might morally support her but would leave her to face her own challenges unassisted. But of course this is an over-simplification. A modern Middle Eastern Kate Chopin would face many social and religious limits that would lead her even faster to the same area of silence to which Kate Chopin was pushed to after The Awakening. And she would not easily learn how to defy those limits or learn smarter ways of expressing the underlying tensions that impatiently wait to be expressed.

Publishing? It is easier to publish on her own if she can afford it but more difficult to be recognized if she does not have enough and continuous relations with the market of writers and critics, which would again mean being around downtown a great deal and attending most of the seminars, events and cultural activities which she will surely try to do. I imagine her at the end of the day excited but dead tired and overwhelmed with all the effort she had to exert to keep going as a mother, worker, and creative writer. Before she goes to bed, she would perhaps take a handful the muscle-relaxant, anti- acidity pills, tranquilizers and painkillers.

Her writing capacity? Surely many ideas would fly into theCairoair before she has time to reflect or record them. Doesn’t she need the Nadwa providing her with enough space and time away from her family, work, the nerve-breaking life she is leading? But not too long to allow things to go wrong back home. Getting in close touch with other writers in a secluded fancy area will do wonders to the quality of her work and surely the ready publishing chances will let her creative flow run softly.

Wouldn’t it be worthy to release more female voices out there? Wouldn’t it be heroic to set them free from their kitchen boards or desktops and fly them like singing birds in the sky? For ten days? A week? A couple of days? If there are two things that will linger in your minds after reading this piece, they will be to read Kate Chopin and call for more writing workshops like the IPAF Nadwa.

Dr. Mona Elnamoury is a lecturer at the faculty of Arts, English Dept., Tanta University. She also teaches at the MSA in the faculty of Languages and Translation, and has translated Ursula LeGuin into Arabic. She also writes.

During recent visits to Jordan and Syria, Boston librarian Diane D’Almeida (pictured) videotaped short interviews with a dozen different Arab authors. She also has since interviewed a dozen Boston-based authors, asking similar basic questions: Why do they write? For whom (if they imagine an audience)? How do they imagine “inspiration”? Do they offer advice to young and emerging authors?

D’Almeida hasn’t yet posted the second set of interviews, and adds that a third set of interviews is also forthcoming: “I have also interviewed translators who can give an idea as to what is involved in translating from the Middle East.”

All the interviews of Arab writers save one (Haddiya Hussein’s) were conducted in English, so I foresee an imbalance between the two sets of author interviews. Jordanian author Rana Azzoubi seems wholly comfortable in English — she writes in English — but for others it’s a foreign language. It would be interesting, perhaps, to see the Boston authors giving their interviews in a second or third language (and be translated back into English, why not).

I am going to guess that, all told, the authors will answer these questions along rather similar lines. It will be interesting to see how it all comes together. I’d also like to see a question such as “How do you see an author’s responsibility to society?” answered by authors from Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Tunisia, Boston, inner-city Boston, and so on.

Without further nattering, the interviews:

Palestinian author Leila Atrash has published several novels (A Woman of Five Seasons is available in English, trans Nora Nweihid Halwani and Christopher Tingley). A TV producer and news editor, she writes a regular column for the Jordanian daily Al-Dustour. You can find excerpts from her work (in translation) on her website.

Atrash: “Never write with ideology, no. This is not the way to write literature. But when I do my articles or my television program, yes. I have that ideology. Because I know my audience. But when I write literature, no.”

Atrash: “Unfortunately, this generation, they are in a hurry. They don’t read… Knowledge is not only to come out of people. You have to absorb the thoughts of other people.”

Jordanian author Samiha Khreis has published several novels and short-story collections. An excerpt of her novel The Poppy was published in Banipal.

Khreis: “I read every day, I write every day. Always, I think about one reader. Maybe he is not a real one, but he is mixed of people. How they will think, how they will read. I have a reader in my mind, yeah.”

Khreis: “When I am young, I am happy with everything I write, and everything I want the people to read it. But now know how to create the novel…you need to delete many things.”

Jordanian author Basma El-Nsour is a Jordanian short story writer and lawyer. She is editor-in-chief of the Jordanian Tayki magazine that specialises in “women’s literature.”

In her formative period, El-Nsour read the “great Russians,” as well as Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris. But her icon was O. Henry. “So he is my role model, he is my hero. The way he writes just makes me want to fly.”

Jordanian Rana Azzoubi has published two books in English for young people: Through a Mud Wall (2006) and Million Star Hotel (2007).

Azzoubi: “With the second book, I struggled more with it, because I’d learned more, so I had to do it better, in a better way. So I actually threw half of it and then I started over again, until I got the story that I wanted.”

Azzoubi writes stories for children because she wants to reach young readers and “to have them relate to…my kids.”

Iraqi author Lutfiyya al-Dulaimi was born in Diyala, Iraq. She has published ten books of fiction, five plays and three books of essays. She also translates from English into Arabic.

Al-Dulaimi: “My stories are about the human being[s'] situation, always. And sometimes it’s about a woman.”

Al-Dulaimi: ”I don’t like to give advices to anybody. But I can say that the writing is not the easy thing to do.”

You can read al-Dulaimi’s “Episode 28: Mannar in Baghdad 2007,” trans. John Peate on Banipal.

Iraqi author Haddiya Hussein was born in Baghdad. She is a novelist and short-story writer.

Hussein: “It would be a great feeling to feel that a change will happen through a book, but it doesn’t…nowadays.”

Diane D’Almeida is the recipient of two Fulbright grants to video and interview Middle Eastern women writers (Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian). She subsequently created a bibliography of many writers and posted videoed selected interviews online at: www.bu.edu/library/guides/caww/index.html

Tell me, O tell me! by the planets that are above
Who is the heavenly herald who is the dove
That thrilled to our midst from yon horizon and sea
To cry live Egypt live independent and free
-Jawdat R. Haydar, in his poem “May Ziadeh” (1931)

After celebrating Khalil Gibran’s 125th anniversary last month, Google has turned its gaze on a poet Gibran greatly admired: Palestinian May Ziadeh.

Ziadeh was born in Nazareth on February 11, 1886.

Ziadeh was an important literary figure both in the Levant and in Egypt, where she immigrated with her family in 1908. She was a prolific poet, translator, short-story writer, essayist, letter-writer, and critic, as well as host to an important literary salon. While her first collection of poetry (Fleurs de Rêve, 1911) was in French, she devoted most of her time and energy to writing in Arabic.

Ziadeh’s poetry and essays were pioneering. She  wrote numerous editorials and, in the words of scholar Antje Ziegler, “courageously took a stand against European colonial politics and defended the freedom of the press and other basic democratic rights.” But she was perhaps best-known for hosting a Tuesday salon, visited and admired by the young Taha Hussein, among others. 

Ziadeh’s life has been fodder for rumor, at least one bad TV serial, and study. Her rise and fall has provided an ongoing attraction. In “Rediscovering May Ziadeh,” Ziegler writes:

Numerous biographical studies of May Ziadeh have appeared in Arabic during the past five decades, and the steady flow of articles in Arabic journals and newspapers suggest the impression that Arab authors continuously feel tempted to interpret the contrasts in her life — her rise and fall from the heights of celebrity to the depths of supposed madness and complete isolation.

Youssef Rakha, writing about Ziadeh in 1999, notes that her work retains an immediate and readable character:

…Ziyada’s admirably level-headed sensibility, the depth and breadth of the sympathy she displays for her subjects and her consistently articulate tone all render the historical gap ultimately negligible.

But, while Ziadeh was a widely respected thinker and writer, after the death of her parents, she found herself in difficult straits. Because she was unmarried, social mores apparently made it impossible for her to continue hosting her salon. Then, according to Ziegler:

When she fell into a temporary depression around 1935, her relatives had her legally declared incompetent and committed her to a hospital for mental diseases in Beirut. A handful of remaining friends, one of them the famous mahjar literate Amin al-Rihani, finally obtained her release with the help of a press campaign in leading Lebanese journals like al-Makshuf.

But, even during the last years of her life, Ziadeh continued to write. Her work is not, to my knowledge, available in English.

More:

A few of Ziadeh’s earliest poems, in French 

May Ziadeh Rediscovered

Al Ahram Weekly: The mirror of Mai

Al Ahram Weekly: Introducing Miss Mai

If I Were Google… (a blogger’s suggestion heard)

Love on Paper: On the relationship between Gibran and Ziadeh

A poem for May:

From Lebanese admirer Jawdat R. Haydar (1905 – 2006)

May Ziadeh

Me thinks that perfection descended from the skies
That is a nymph with a twin of dark piercing eyes
Paraissent le Dimanche in the French Images
As the quessn thought of all bards in all languages

Tell me, O tell me! by the planets that are above
Who is the heavenly herald who is the dove
That thrilled to our midst from yon horizon and sea
To cry live Egypt live independent and free

She is Venus and the marrow of liberty
She came to carve with letters of perpetuity
Over Egypt in the sky withal on the sea
Live Egypt down the ages and God be with thee

Nablus,
1931

Inanna Publications has sent out a call for its new anthology, scheduled for publication in the fall of this year.

The book, called Min Timeh: Arab Feminist Reflections on Identity, Resistance, and Space, is being edited by Ghadeer Malek and Ghaida Moussa. Abstract submissions should be in by Feb. 28, with full submissions ready by the end of April.

Organizers describe the anthology as:

…a meeting space for Arab feminist womyn living in the Arab world and the Diaspora. While physical and metaphorical distances and borders lie in between us, deep founded connection and intertwined roots seem to transcend these divisions and connect us to one another.  Our grounded experiences and our reflections as Arab womyn living in Canada, as well as our relationships with communities of feminists in the Arab world — from Lebanon, to Egypt, Syria, Palestine and the Gulf — have served as a testimony to these connections, and to the evolution of our shared identity characterized by our often shared struggles, burdens, and questions across various geographical locations, genders, ages, classes, races, religions, and the experiences we live based on these political categories.

Editors are looking for personal critical narratives, academic essays, and written and visual arts on subjects that include homeland, exile, arrivals and departures, feminism, queerness, borders, national struggles, solidarity, and (de)colonization.

They are particularly interested in women here in Egypt, and have tossed out three “guiding questions”:

-       What are some of the physical, metaphorical, and political connections and distances in Arab womyn identities and issues across the Arab world and the Diaspora?

-       How have Arab womyn built and developed their identities?

-       What role does identity play in shaping Arab feminist struggles and organizing and how does it change with time and context?

Creative submissions (in addition to the academic) are strongly encouraged. Proposals and questions should be sent to arabfeministanthology – at – gmail.com.

What if you’re not an Arab feminist?

Well, Inanna also accepts book proposals. You might perhaps translate the work of an Arab feminist.

Thanks to Sofia Samatar for sharing this.

Novelist Salwa Bakr spoke to CASA students this past week about women and Arabic literature, beginning with the 1980s, when, “Every day you would open the window and find a female author writing a new book”:

By Elisabeth Jaquette

“When I first started to write, people would ask me – ‘Who wrote this for you?’”

Salwa Bakr, prominent Egyptian author and critic, explored the challenges facing women writers in a lecture at CASA (the Center for Arabic Study Abroad) at the American University in Cairo on Monday, November 12th. “A question like this reflects the kind of writing that society expects women to be able to produce,” she said.

Salwa Bakr is acclaimed for her portrayal of women’s personal lives and Egypt’s poorer social classes. Her first collection of short stories, Zinat at the President’s Funeral, was published in 1985, and she has since published six additional short story collections, seven novels and a play.

Four of her books have been translated into English, including The Wiles of Men and Other Stories, Such a Beautiful Voice, The Golden Chariot, and The Man from Bashmour, which was listed as one of the 105 best Arabic novels by the Arab Writers Union.

Bakr is a passionate speaker, committed to the power of literature to address and change social inequalities. She began by highlighting the discrepancy between women’s political and social gains over the past century and the limited roles still reserved for them in literature. She celebrated the broad participation of women in the 2011 revolution, emphasizing that whether recognized or not, women have participated in every stage of Egypt’s history.

The dilemma, however “is the old idea that women create life and men create the world: women have all the roles related to pregnancy, childbirth, and the family, but it is men who create history.” There is a gap between women’s position in society and society’s expectations of them, Bakr said: even though today, women are active in politics and work in more professions fields than ever, it socially unacceptable to portray them in any role other than mother, sister, wife or daughter.

The responsibility for this contradiction lies across the political spectrum: “It’s not just the Salafis, or the Islamic political current, or the Muslim Brotherhood responsible for the deterioration of the situation of women in the Arab world. Secular, liberal parties are equally unable to offer new, more advanced or radical steps for improving women’s situation in society.”

Bakr suggested that the lack of political support explains the surge of women seeking to express these contradictions through literature, especially in recent decades.

The wave of women writers that emerged in Egypt and the Arab world during the 1980s marked the beginning of this trend: “Every day you would open the window and find a female author writing a new book.” These initial attempts were trials at self-expression; women writers were often from elite social classes, unconcerned with giving voice to problems facing the vast majority of women. Yet the movement laid the groundwork for those who began to reconsider systemic barriers against women and express their desires to achieve things in society as citizens.

For Bakr, writing is ultimately an act of social justice. “I consider women’s writings a way to express the dilemmas of women,” she said, “especially during the days of the women’s political movement, and especially to express the concerns of women living in poverty in poor countries like Egypt.”

Yet the critical and societal reception of women’s writing has remained a challenge. Most critics remain unable to differentiate between the woman as a person and the woman as a writer. Some presume Bakr’s stories are autobiographical, and that a woman author would only be able to write about her own experiences. Many consider women’s writing to be overstepping the boundaries of decency, criticizing them for talking openly about their personal or sexual concerns. Society’s politics and its position on women define the borders of freedom of expression, which in turn leads to self-censorship, especially with regards to religion, politics, and sex.

Bakr also critiqued the representation of women in literature, criticizing both men and women authors for failing to write good female characters. “In most cases, women continue to write from a man’s point of view on the world, because the foundational literary references are those written by men. For example, when a female author describes a woman, she writes as a man would, saying ‘She was like an apple, or a flower.’ As a woman, I don’t notice these things in other women. I would say that a character is clever, or heroic, because I don’t see a woman through the eyes of a man, I see her through my own eyes. I don’t see her physical features alone, or see her as an object, the way a man sees her. This isn’t just a problem in Arab literature, but in world literature throughout its history.”

By contrast, Bakr strives to present a woman’s perspective in her own writing. “I think a woman has her own point of view, different from a man, and that’s natural, due to the context of the environment, her upbringing, and the role of society. I try to present small details that may seem trivial to some, with the idea that a woman’s perspective is different.”

For those seeking literature that succeeds in presenting good female characters, Bakr recommended The Chrysalis (al-Sharnaka) by Soliman Fayyad, Little Songs in the Shade of Tamara (Taraneem fi Zil Tamara) by Mohammad Afify, and Beginning and End (Bedaya we Nehaya) by Naguib Mahfouz. Little Songs in the Shade of Tamara and Beginning and End are both available in English translation.

Bakr ended her lecture with thoughts on what defines good writing and what it means to be a good person in the world today. “Good writing is writing that changes you, where you can’t return to how you were before you interacted with it; writing that takes you from where you began to someplace entirely new. The role of literature now, in this complex moment in human history, is an extremely important one with regards to knowledge. It’s a question related to good and evil. In this world, good and evil have become very complex. What is good, and what is evil? Literature enables us – as readers and as recipients – to address these human complexities and answer difficult, complicated questions like these. Is this enough to be a good person in this world, today? Is it enough? It isn’t. We need more knowledge, and for that we need literature, which at its core deals with humans and their world. We need literature that can lead us to other regions of knowledge, from one world to another.”

Elisabeth Jaquette is a MA student in Anthropology at Columbia University and a CASA fellow at the American University in Cairo. She has lived in Cairo since 2007, where she runs an Arabic-English book club and tweets at @lissiejaquette.

This is the International Women’s Day issue. So, I know, it should be 8s, since this is the 8th. Maybe next year:

By Egyptian artist Mai Refky.

SIX POEMS & PROSE EXCERPTS By ARAB WOMEN WRITERS:

Iman Mersal’s “Oranges,” trans. Khaled Mattawa

Maram al-Massri’s “Women Like Me,” trans. Khaled Mattawa

Nujoom al-Ghanem “She Who Resembles Herself,” trans. Khaled al-Masri

Hanan al-Shaykh’s “Beirut 1934,” trans. Roger Allen

Nazik al-Mala’ika “Love Song for Words,” trans. Rebecca Carol Johnson

Adania Shibli’s “Out of Time,” trans. the author

Six profiles of, INTERVIEWS WITH Arab women writers:

Egyptian novelist Salwa Bakr: “Bakr suggested that the lack of political support explains the surge of women seeking to express these contradictions through literature, especially in recent decades.”

Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh: “During all those years in which I played the role of a frustrated housewife, I used to read that letter, look around and wonder, ‘Is this what I expected from life? To cook and wash dishes and wait for a husband who believes that I am here to make up for his mistakes?’”

Hanan al-Shaykh

Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh: “ I remember a professor at one of the American universities and she told me, ‘Oh, Ms. al-Shaykh, I love your work. But I don’t dare to teach it because I don’t want people to think that this is how the Arabs are.’”

Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat: “I’m never interested about heroes, about men who make history and the characters who believe in something. I don’t have an answer to anything, so when we were on our tour I let the other writers answer the big questions.”

Iraqi novelist Hadiya Hussein: ”Indeed, I feel closer to my country when I’m away. It is like a work of art: It gets clearer the more we step away from it.”

Algerian writer/filmmaker Assia Djebar: “… yes, sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure.”

Six Arab Women Writers (Who Are Interesting) on Twitter

@nellyali is a blogger, activist, and doctoral student who writes & tweets powerfully about the lives of Cairo’s street children. For instance, here. And here.

@Sarahcarr is the ruler of the Egyptian English-language twitterverse, if only because the rest of us are scared of her. She blogs, usually hilariously, at http://inanities.org.

@randajarrar  is a witty, fun Palestinian-American novelist (A Map of Home) and also writes short pieces in various places, many of which you can find on her website, http://randajarrar.com/.

@NouraNoman  is an Emirati writer, author of one of Arabic’s first YA sci fi novels, and also blogs at http://no-censorship.blogspot.com/. She tweets about the Arabic language, science fiction, the practice of writing.

@SophiaAlMaria  is a Qatari writer, author of The Girl Who Fell to Earth, and tweets about various things, including, “Need a good, amusing name for a Salafi character…quick…” More at http://girlwhofelltoearth.com/.

@suzeeinthecity is a photographer/blogger who tweets about graffiti, among other things. She blogs here, and has a recent one about “women in graffiti,” but I haven’t taken a hair off any of her images, as it threatens those who do with hurt.

SIX Arab Women WRITErs Mentioned for Nobel Prize for Literature:

Painting by Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan, (1925 – ). Adnan, a Lebanese author who continues to be a vibrant force in the literary scene, has written a number of pioneering works. You can certainly see her impact in the recently released Homage to Etel Adnan.

Nawal al-Saadawi, (1931 –  ). Al-Saadawi, an Egyptian activist, doctor, and novelist, is a bit improbable as a Nobel Prize for Lit winner, although she is certainly an indomitable political force. Her memoirs are perhaps most interesting (more interesting than her fiction); Memoirs from a Women’s Prison in particular.

Assia Djebar, (1936 – ). Djebar, an Algerian author and filmmaker who writes in French, has been a regular on the Nobel list since her Neustadt award. Works in translation include her Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. 

Hanan al-Shaykh, (1945 – ). Lebanese-British al-Shaykh is author of the brilliant Story of Zahra, Women of Sand and Myrrh, among others; most of her works are available in English, several translated by Catherine Cobham.

Radwa Ashour, (1946 – ). A wide-ranging Egyptian novelist In translation you can find her meta-fictional Specters, as well as Granada and Siraj, and I understand that her celebrated Farag is forthcoming from BQFP.

Huda Barakat, (1952 – ) Also Lebanese, her Tiller of Waters and Stones of Laughter are beautifully layered and textured, like the fabrics in Tiller, with a wonderful exploration of the relationship between humans and the objects of daily life.

Videos: Six Arab Women on Why They Write

Interviewed by Boston librarian Diane D’Almeida.

Six ONLINE Resources: Finding & REAding More Arab Women Writers

ArabWomenWriters.Com

Boston University’s page of Arab Women Writers

Belletrista: women-authored literature from around the world

Banipal’s contributors page

RAWI – Radius of Arab American Writers

Arab World Writers: Authors’ Pages

AND…Six Questions

Should There Be Quotas for Women in Saudi Book Clubs?

Too Much Sex in Saudi Women’s Lit?

Is Arabic Literature (in Translation) Overwhelmingly Male?

Why Would Kate Chopin Want to Participate in the IPAF ‘Nadwa’?

Should There Be an ‘Orange Prize’ for Arab Women Writers?

Who Has the Power? (Reading Arab Women in English)

Also, commentary on IWD:

Ahram Online: This year we celebrate International Women’s Day: “In celebrating this day for women, we must prepare for the battles ahead – not just the ones that are being fought. We must also remember that the politics of gender are at the heart of the struggle for human rights, dignity and decent livelihoods.”

In a recent dispatch for Words Without Borders, translator Alison Anderson asked: ”Where are the Women in Translation?“

Two years ago, when Michael Orthofer at the Literary Saloon estimated the percentage of women’s works being translated, he came up with a number of around 20%. This year, Anderson estimated a higher rate: “over the last two years, an average of 26% of the books of fiction or poetry published in the United States were by women.”

But the numbers get lower when it comes to prizes: For the Best Translated Book Award, 17% of the books on the longlist were by women, and 21% of the shortlists, fiction and poetry combined. The PEN translation prize hit 15%, and, Anderson writes, for “the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP): over the last three years, 13% of the longlist, and 16% of the shortlist (in other words, the “token” woman on the shortlist of six). No woman author has ever won this prize since its founding in 1990.”

In Arabic literature, this question also comes up. Egyptian novelist Salwa Bakr recently discussed this (“Women and Arabic Literature,” by Lissie Jaquette) and this question comes up nearly every year at the International Prize for Arabic Fiction press conferences: Where are the women? In its six-year tenure, 22 % of the authors on the IPAF longlist have been women.

You can make from it what you will: Women don’t choose to become authors; women don’t write good books; women’s good books aren’t promoted; women’s good books aren’t deemed prize-worthy; journalists these days will write about anything; statistics don’t belong in the literary world.

Counting is not my favorite thing, so I’m sure I’ve missed spots. I tried to avoid anthologies (unless they were all-women anthologies) and non-literary works.

AUC Press 38 / 170 = 22 % Arabic literature (in translation) by women.

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing 3 / 10 = 33 % Arabic literature (in translation) by women.

Interlink 11 / 37 = 30% Arabic literature (in translation) by women. (Note that I’m not counting excellent translations of work by Arab authors like Etel Adnan, Assia Djebar, and Leila Marouane).

There are many 0%-ers, like Archipelago, which Orthofer notes scores low on women-authored books in general. All Archipelago’s Arabic translations are from Mahmoud Darwish and Elias Khoury. But who could fault Archipelago for choosing Darwish and Khoury?

Over at the Literary Saloon, Orthofer says:

This seems to be a really deep-rooted problem/issue, and publishers really might want to look into this: I note, for example, that of the sixteen just announced 2013 English PEN grants for translation (see also below) two are anthologies, thirteen of the to-be-translated books are by men, and one is by a woman (Julia Franck). Seriously folks ?

I am not problematizing the issue here; just noting it.

Adam Talib recently gave a talk at the American University in Cairo on “Translating for Bigots.” Talib, who is working on his fourth translated novel, posed the question — how should one translate for a prejudiced audience? — rather than answering it:

From a slide in the presentation “Translating for Bigots.”

Talib began by saying that he didn’t want “to stereotype the bigot. I don’t want to say his address is in Cleveland.” After all, Talib said, one doesn’t translate Arabic literature into English for a North American or British audience, but for an audience of English-language readers worldwide.

Publishers, Talib said, can sometimes package books for bigots (see right). This packaging might be one reason why readers leap to particular conclusions about an author’s narrative. On the other hand, Talib added, he doesn’t necessarily “blame” the publishers, as he also wants to get translated Arabic literature out to a wide audience, and this might be one way to do it.

So who is this wide audience? Talib briefly touched on studies that measure Islam- and Arabophobia, remarking on a time when a British-Egyptian filmmaker he knew was asked by a UK audience member: “Can women in Egypt use the Internet?”

This question, although a particular head-scratcher, is “evidence of a cultural gap between the specialist translator and the potential audience,” Talib said. “Should a translator keep this in mind? I personally have a hard time not keeping these things in mind.“

These prejudices are an issue with any Arabic literature in translation, but they were most at hand, Talib said, when dealing with Arab women writers and Arab women characters.

“Translating Arab women characters is…extremely fraught. Why? Because if you’re a reader of modern Arabic literature, you know that what happens in modern Arabic literature. People date in modern Arabic literature; people have sex in modern Arabic literature; people drink and take drugs. And a lot of times, you will just translate what you find on the page, and you’ll find that reviewers find this peculiar.”

If a reviewer — who Talib sees as a proxy for the reader — finds an Arab woman not wrapped in ten layers of fabric, forced to marry her cross-eyed cousin, and pushed to the back seat of a car, then, “the reviewer says, ‘What an unrealistic depiction of Arab women.’”

“There is a hostility in the reader’s mind” to characters who don’t fit particular stereotypes, Talib said.

Moreover, he said, normally strong readers can lose their bearings when looking at Arabic literature. He pointed to Mekkawi Said’s novel Cairo Swan Song, which has a distinctly unlikeable protagonist. English-language readers are more likely to conflate this protagonist with the author, Talib said, and “you’ll find less tolerance for this sort of psychological depiction in Arabic literature than you’ll find in English literature.”

“For some reason, there is some obstacle to sophisticated reading when you’re dealing with translated literature.”

Talib also wondered if there was a way to compensate for readers’ stereotypes in the language. Certainly, translators can help by bringing out the power of the author’s language, which — in a best-case — should help to re-create the author’s authority.

The talk ended on a discussion of a section of Khairy Shalaby’s The Hashish Waiter. The novel, Talib said, had a section abridged in the French edition because a few of the characters were discussing the use of Holocaust narratives as propaganda. In so doing, the characters brush aside the great sufferings of Jews and others during the Holocaust. This section could be read, at a stretch, as Holocaust denial, and thus it was truncated in the French.

Because Shalaby is an Arab writer, Talib guessed that people are predisposed to read the characters’ views as his and to see him as an anti-Semite. “I don’t want Khairy Shalaby to be read as an anti-Semite.” But how to change the reader’s expectations? The question remained open.

Also:

ArabLit: Q&A with Adam Talib, Translator of Khairy Shalaby’s ‘The Hashish Waiter’

ArabLit: Cairo’s First Ever Translation Slam: Judge for Yourself

Adam Talib’s blog

I feel rather lukewarm about this “Year of Reading Women,” despite an earnest belief that women’s books are (generally speaking) not taken as seriously as men’s:

Joanna Walsh’s “year of reading women” bookmarks.

Which women’s voices will this #readwomen2014 prioritize? Does it touch on any of the reasons why we gravitate toward male protagonists? Will it be, in the main, a celebration of English-language women’s voices? Of women at the center or the peripheries?

But despite my reservations, there’s a good enough chance that I’m wrong — in my lukewarmness — so if you’re keen to play along, this is a list of twelve suggestions of Arabic-writing women. Bonus points where the translator is also a woman. So here it is, one for every month of the year:

January: Hanan al-Shaykh, Story of Zahra, trans Peter Ford. You just cannot go wrong with Story of Zahra, which is also one of the five books on my “how to get started with Arabic literature” list.

February: Adania Shibli, Touch, trans. Paula Haydar. Or, if you prefer, We Are All Equally Far from Love, trans. Paul Starkey. Shibli is for those of you who are literarily-minded, who enjoy a woman’s narrative that lives outside traditional Western story-building. With its surprising poetic imagery, Touch could just as easily be classed as a collection of prose poems.

March: Samar Yazbek, Woman in the Crossfire, trans Max Weiss. Raw, honest, terrifying, hopeful portrait of the first few months of uprising in Syria by one of its leading novelists.

April: Hoda Barakat, Tiller of Waters, trans. Marilyn Booth. It’s true, Barakat is big on the male protagonist, but with an amazing empathy and sensitivity both to characters and to objects of daily life.

May: Sahar Khalifeh, Of Noble Origins, trans. Aida Bamia. Winner of the prestigious Mohamed Zafzaf prize, Khalifeh is a strong and prolific author with many novels in English translation. My suggestion is her most recent, in particular because it shows an important historic moment from a woman’s point of view.

June: Alexandra Chrietieh, Always Coca-Cola, trans. Michelle Hartman. This book is very much a piece of women’s writing, centered more on the contradictions of daily life than in rising and falling action. It’s also very funny.

July: Iman Humaydan Younes, Wild Mulberries, trans. Michelle Hartman. There’s also another book of Younes’s coming out this year, trans. Hartman, Other Lives. 

August: Radwa Ashour, Woman of Tantoura. I would like to recommend Radwa Ashour’s Farag (which is supposed to be out as Blue Lorries in May), trans. Barbara Romaine, but BQFP has been sliding on deadlines lately. But whenever it’s out, do get it. Ashour’s Spectres is also a wonderful metafictional view of women’s lives.

September: Najwa Barakat, Salaam!, trans. Luke Leafgren. This difficult and powerful novel finally brings an important Lebanese author into English.

October: Iman Mersal, These Are Not Oranges, My Love,  Khaled Mattawa. I would like to recommend Mersal’s Until I Give Up the Idea of Houses, but alas it’s not yet in English. Poems from Oranges here.

November: Miral al-Tahawy, Brooklyn Heights, trans. Samah Selim. All of al-Tahawy’s books deal with women’s lives (this one in New York and Egypt), but this one is additionally translated by an award-winning (woman) translator.

December: Betool Khedairi, Absent, trans.  Muhayman Jamil. I once had a torrid love affair with this book, which takes us from a vibrant and beautiful mosaic of Baghdad and moves toward the present.

More, more, more women:

Salwa Bakr on ‘Women and Arabic Literature’:  “When I first started to write, people would ask me – ‘Who wrote this for you?’”

6 Arab Women Authors on Why They Write

Arab Women Writers: A partial bibliography

There’s also a much longer list of authors at http://arabwomenwriters.com/

And this is an anthology worth having.

What does the Arab Writers Union recommend? Women on “top 105 Arabic novels of the 20th century” list:

Beirut Nightmares, by Syrian author Ghada Samman, was translated by Nancy N. Roberts and published by Quartet Books in 1998. The book fell out of print, but Quartet Books re-released Beirut Nightmares this past September.

I Live, by Lebanese author Leila Baalbaki. Published in French – Je vis! Seuil 1958 and in German – Ich lebe, Lenos 1994. Not in English.

Memory in the Flesh, by the Algerian writer Ahlam Mostaghanmi, was published by AUC press in 2003 and republished this year as Bridges of Constantine, trans. Raphael Cohen.

The Story of Zahra, by the Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh. I promise you can’t go wrong with this book.

Wasmiya Comes Out of the Sea, by the Kuwaiti author Laila al-Othman, was excerpted in Banipal 3. The whole book is not in English.

Granada, by the Egyptian author Radwa Ashour. Granada was translated by William Granara (sometimes Bill Granara) and published by Syracuse University Press.

Door to the Courtyard, by the Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh. Bab el-Saha, however, has not been translated into English. You can find it in German – Das Tor (Unionsverlag, 2004) and French – L’impasse de bab essaha (Flammarion, 1998).

The Blockade, by Bahraini author Fawzia Rasheed. Not in English.

Birds of September, by the Lebanese author Emily Nasrallah. Not in English.

Birds of The Dawn, by the Lebanese author Lily Osseiran. Not in English.

A Man from Bashmour, by the Egyptian Salwa Bakr, was published by AUC Press in a translation by Nancy Roberts.

The Open Door, by Egyptian author Latifa Al-Zayat, translated by Marilyn Booth, AUC Press.

7iber’s Siwar Masannat was present at the February 10 shortlist announcement for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. She writes about the possibilities and im-possibilities of judging novels and the relationship between identity and writing style:

By Siwar Masannat

The four judges who were present at the IPAF shortlist announcement. Photo credit: Hussam Da’ana

The defensive stance the judges and Chairman of the IPAF Trustees took in response to questions regarding diversity and identity echoed the notion that novels are selected due to their merit, and based on: “literary or artistic criteria” (Abdullah Ibrahim),  ”strength of narrative structure and use of creative language, and concurrently, less flaws” (Zhor Gourram), and “innovation in the techniques of narration and exposition” (Saad Albazei).

Perhaps the most reasonable claims were made by Libyan journalist and writer Ahmed Alfaitouri, who referred to himself as the “voice of the novelists” in the judging panel. Alfaitouri asserted that “prizes do not endow a work of fiction actual value. Rather, they are more celebratory than critically evaluative. When we say we have looked at more than 150 manuscripts with objectivity and rationality, we mean that each of these works is understood impressionistically, exclusively, and momentarily.”

According to Abdullah Ibrahim, there was a large percentage of novels written by women in the list of nominated books; however the process of “literary purification” culminated in the exclusion of a lot of works that did not exhibit “the artistic criteria.” That said, the short list does include one “lady” writer.

“We evaluate works based on artistic criteria exhibited in them, and not according to the writer or the country to which they belong,” Ibrahim said.

I find this statement extremely dismissive in terms of identity, and specifically gender identity, in relation to writing style. When societies marginalize and discriminate against their members according to identity, holding a constricted (read: male, masculine, and heteronormative) identity model as the “norm” or “default” against which “other” identities are evaluated, judged, and measured, who is to say that works by women do not exhibit “artistic elements” that intentionally deviate from the “male, masculine, heteronormative” criteria particularly due to their lived experience and identity position in society? Actually, Ibrahim never really defines the “artistic criteria” according to which he performs his “literary purification.”

In writing and composition theories, macroscopic (context, holistic text, narrative, etc) and microscopic (semantics, grammatical stylistics, vernacular, etc) elements tend to exhibit relations to a writer’s cognitive and psychological elements associated with identity (gender, sex, sexuality, culture, politics, nationality, etc). Is it not possible that women are perhaps capable of writing differently? Innovatively? And if they are, which is hard (and sexist) to logically deny, does this not mean that perhaps Ibrahim (if not others, as well) did not consider that when making this statement?

Identity may not (and perhaps should not) be an element in the interpretive and evaluative considerations we apply to texts; however, ignoring that identity perhaps plays a role, and that identity perhaps helps structure and shape a writer’s literary craft and aesthetic sensibility is irresponsible.

To mention the “large ratio” of women writers dismissed throughout the exclusion process definitely raises a red flag, for this reader and writer at least.

This is by no means a call for affirmative action or a quota for women writers. Not at all. It is, perhaps, a call for courtesy in how such panels approach literary criteria, express their methodology, and defend the gender imbalance apparent in several (if not all) aspects of this prize.

Another problematic issue is how judge Abdullah Ibrahim mentions a conflict between two methods of writing: what he describes as the “new eloquence” and the “traditional” method. He describes true mastery as the narrative representation of the reality of our societies, especially in terms of conflict and fragmentation/dissociation, and the inferior positioning of women in society. He describes the “new eloquence” as a style that the previous generation is not used to encountering.

Again, here we have a problematic positioning of style/craft into two camps: “new eloquence” and “traditional.” This is narrow, if not completely reductive. Experimentalism, which might be an aspect that Suleiman is implicitly referencing, does not manifest itself through one component of the literary text. Alongside the defensive and repetitive mention of privileging skill and literary craft over content and theme on the part of all attendees, this is a further narrow scope through which to view “literary criteria.”

In certain genres of experimental literatures, including the novel, content and form are not consistently easy to pull apart, co-dependence of aspects of the texts structurally–or de-constructionally– render form, shape, and aesthetics organically inseparable from theme, meaning, and content. For Suleiman (and others) to make this claim about 150+ books certainly lacks a responsible acknowledgment of the diverse particularities of literary production, consumption, and appreciation; a serious issue for an “international” prize that celebrates the contemporary Arabic novel.

Siwar Masannat is the managing editor at 7iber. She has an MFA in poetry from George Mason. Her poems have appeared in The Journal, VOLT, and New Orleans Review, among others. 

Th. Emil Homerin, author of the recently-published The Principles of Sufism, has long been interested in the work of ‘A’ishah al-Ba’uniyyah, who is perhaps the most prolific and prominent woman who wrote in Arabic prior to the modern period. Homerin, a professor of religion and former chair of the Department of Religion & Classics at the University of Rochester, previously translated a collection of al-Ba’uniyyah’s poems as Emanations of Grace, and likens her work to that of the famous Persian poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi.

Th. Emil Homerin

In a Skype interview originally published on the Library of Arabic Literature, Homerin talked about how he found al-Ba’uniyyah’s manuscripts—which was like finding “a needle in a haystack”—and what changes when you can read Sufi poetry alongside the author’s own spiritual guidebook.

ArabLit: Before translating The Principles of Sufism, you worked on translating a collection of ‘A’ishah’s poetry, Emanations of Grace. How did you come to these works?

Th. Emil Homerin: One of the times I’d gone over to Egypt, I was working on the poetry from the Mamluk period, basically 1250-1517.

I was looking for all sorts of poets, but part of my concern was to see if I could find women poets. I had read about women poets, I had their names—hers I did not have—but of others. People would say, ‘Oh, such-and-such a woman wrote poetry,’ but you could never find it. Or you might find one or two poems, or a few verses in a death notice.

So basically I was spending time at Dar al-Kutub and its manuscript collection in Cairo, and I would just go through the titles list, looking though books of poetry and hoping that I could find one by a woman. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Then I saw an elderly gentleman walk over to a wall I hadn’t really noticed before. And there was an old card catalog over there. I went over and asked him, ‘Sir, what is this?” And he was kind of surprised, here’s this blond kid talking to him in Arabic. He said, “This is the card catalog from the 1920s.” And I said, “You don’t use the catalog by title?” And he said, “Yes, I use that too, but this one sometimes is better, but I hate to tell you this, it’s by author.” And I just smiled and said, “Thank you so much.”

And then I start writing down women’s names in Arabic.

And then I went into the card catalog, and after a while, lo and behold, I find ‘A’ishah. And that led me to the manuscripts.

AL: You were working with a number of other poets at the time. But you focused on ‘A’ishah. Why?

TEH: First of all, I had a collection of poetry by a woman. It still may be one of the only ones by a woman in Arabic. There’s also one by Wallada [bint al-Mustakfi], who was a Muslim in Andalusia who wrote in the eleventh century.

Then I started reading, and I found out it’s Sufi verse, and that’s my specialty, and I thought, “This is great.” And then I found her guide book, and I thought, “Good Lord, I’ve got the ability to read what her mystical doctrines are and compare them to her poetry.” Because so many mystical poets never wrote a guidebook, or anything in prose; you’re always trying to tease out what they may or may not believe, or what school of Islamic mysticism they belong to, and so forth, according to their poetry. But here I had sources that told me exactly what she believed.

AL: What’s sustained your interest in ‘A’ishah’s work?

TEH: ‘A’ishah is one of the very few women mystics in Islam who wrote and spoke for herself prior to the modern period. That gives us some important perspectives from the viewpoint of a woman on her society, on Islamic mysticism, and on Islam in general.

AL: Do you read ‘A’ishah’s writing as somehow gendered? Are there particular markers that tell you “this is a woman”—stylistically, tonally, word choice?

The one exception would be that, in many of her mystical love poems, she assumes the role of a woman with God or the prophet Muhammad as her lover. This is “lover” in the sense of her beloved, but not necessarily in any kind of passionate sense. And so she will keep, in her better poems, an ambiguity, so you don’t know if she’s talking about her husband or her Sufi master or Muhammad or God. There’s a nice ambiguity there.

TEH: The short answer is: No.

The one exception would be that, in many of her mystical love poems, she assumes the role of a woman with God or the prophet Muhammad as her lover. This is “lover” in the sense of her beloved, but not necessarily in any kind of passionate sense. And so she will keep, in her better poems, an ambiguity, so you don’t know if she’s talking about her husband or her Sufi master or Muhammad or God. There’s a nice ambiguity there.

In one of the articles that I have written, I took a look at how Aisha was viewed by her contemporaries. And they basically viewed her as they viewed a male Sufi master—using the same epitaphs and so forth, only in the feminine form. And looking at her work, for instance The Principles of Sufism, it is very much in the classical mode of a Sufi guide. And I really can’t say that I see any particular emphasis that I ascribe to gender.

AL: What about the encouraging positivity in which the book is suffused? Would you find a similar positivity in a work by a male mystic?

The person who I would compare her to is Jalal al-Din Rumi, the great Persian poet.

TEH: Sometimes. It depends on the mystic. The person who I would compare her to is Jalal al-Din Rumi, the great Persian poet. He was always an optimist, and he was living in trying times up there in Anatolia in the thirteenth century. He was always confident of God’s mercy, of God’s love, and we see that in ‘A’ishah’s work as well.

You can have other male mystics who are not nearly as optimistic, who are maybe a little more droll or concerned with divine chastisement. Although ‘A’ishah quotes a range of authors, overall though, in the end, she’s got that positive aspect. And I think that’s another thing that made her endearing to me to spend time translating. I’m not one who’d want to translate the blues all the time.

AL: Is that positivity part of what made her popular in her time?

TEH: That was probably something that attracted attention to her. Another thing that really attracted attention to her is that she is a very fine poet, and she really understands the Arabic poetic tradition. So in some of her other works, for instance one of her poems called “The Clear Inspiration,” she quotes or refers to fifty other classical poets. That’s a showing-off, too. But it really shows her skills.

Her uncle, Ibrahim, was considered one of the best Arab poets of his generation. According to some sources, she studied with him. So I think that her poetic ability, and it comes over into her prose, was very attractive to her contemporaries.

AL: But, in The Principles of Sufism, there’s really no way to see that she’s a woman. If you didn’t know her name, would there be something about her work that you’d find particularly female?

TEH: I don’t think I’d know that, no.

What’s noteworthy about The Principles of Sufism is she’s very careful to quote her sources. Now, this is also rare. Part of it may be that she’s writing a little later than many others who wrote Sufi guidebooks.

She’s very careful to quote her sources, and almost all of the sources are books by men. There are stories of pious women, but there are no quotations from other women, because this may be the first Sufi guidebook written by a woman.

AL: Growing up in Damascus in the fifteenth century, would her education have been different from her brothers’?

No, her education was not different. We know for a fact it was exactly the same as her five brothers.

TEH: No, her education was not different. We know for a fact it was exactly the same as her five brothers. Her father was the chief judge of Damascus, so this was a very prominent family. That’s oftentimes the trend, when you find learned women—and there are a quite a few of them throughout Islamic history—most of them come from elite families that could afford to give their daughters the same education, or an education, as they did their sons.

AL: So that wouldn’t have been unusual, to educate a daughter of the family exactly as the sons?

TEH: No.

AL: You wrote elsewhere that it wasn’t usual for women to teach and be scholars in the Mamluk regions, but that they rarely—as ‘A’ishah did—composed their own original work. Why do you suppose? What is the line? 

TEH: Well, I can only speculate. Did they have the time? Did they have the ambition? ‘A’ishah comes off as a very strong, very confident person who was not afraid to write and put things down. Again, she came from a family that did that. And we do have some bits and pieces of poetry from other women, but just not complete collections. So we do have poems for sure. And, to be blunt, there could be things out there by other women and we just don’t know it. The manuscript collections are immense.

AL: Who read ‘A’ishah’s work during her lifetime? Both men and women? More often men?

Certainly her poems would’ve been recited among men. She exchanged poems with male scholars when she was in Cairo; we have the exchanges. So they’re writing poems back to each other. Oftentimes poems of praise, and they’re being clever with their plays on words and names and so forth. It’s a kind of educated pastime among the elite, sharing poems.

TEH: We don’t know that much about what women were doing at this time–this is why she’s very important. But she probably recited these poems to other women, and that could’ve included the sultan’s wife, because they had mutual friends when she was in Egypt.

Certainly her poems would’ve been recited among men. She exchanged poems with male scholars when she was in Cairo; we have the exchanges. So they’re writing poems back to each other. Oftentimes poems of praise, and they’re being clever with their plays on words and names and so forth. It’s a kind of educated pastime among the elite, sharing poems.

AL: And there’s no reference to men writing or saying, ‘A woman shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing.’

TEH: Oh no. When she’s in Cairo and she’s having these exchanges, she’s a widow. She’s probably in her fifties. Her son is with her, and he’s working as a secretary for the Sultan, and she’s living in the quarters of a family friend with his wife. Certainly somebody’s going to take exception, you’re always going to have conservative elements, but we don’t know of it.

AL: So The Principles of Sufism, her guidebook: Do we have a sense of how many people read it and used it and how readers used it?

TEH: No. So far, the manuscript I use is the only complete manuscript I know about. There are parts of it in another manuscript in Cairo, but it’s not complete. Because of the civil war in Syria, I haven’t been able to get there to find out what they might have, because she spent most of her life in Damascus. I did look when I was in Istanbul, and they have some books by her father and her uncles, but they don’t have this one either. That’s not totally surprising, because they have more Turkish than Arabic, but for a while they controlled Cairo.

That might tell you that it wasn’t used that much, because we don’t have that many copies. Whereas her poetry, we have quite a few copies of those. But that could just also be chance.

AL: But in general, ‘A’ishah wrote for a broad audience?

TEH: I believe so, yes. Literacy was probably fairly high in Cairo and Damascus because of Qu’ran schools and so forth, so that people could read. We know for instance that merchants and artisans could read, not just the scholarly cadre. But also, people would read these things out loud. So that’s another teaching mechanism. So I think she saw herself as having a broad audience.

AL: In translating the work, were there parts you found particularly challenging?

TEH: Sometimes the meaning of the words, or she’s using obscure forms. Other times she’s using colloquial elements, which can be fun. That’s where we usually can bring in contractions and more American English to translate. That can be enjoyable.

AL: It took you around ten years of working on and off on the translation of ‘A’ishah’s poems, Emanations of Grace. Does translating her poetry take more time that translating ‘A’ishah’s prose?

TEH: When I was working on Aisha’s poems, I had to edit them first, because they were still in manuscript. After I translate a poem, I don’t really want to publish it for two years. I want to be able to come back and work it over and think it through.

So right up until the time of publishing, as it went to the press, I was still tinkering with translations. The prose is more straightforward. It doesn’t mean that there weren’t issues there that I didn’t have to go through and work over. That’s usually less of a problem.

AL: Beyond specialists, who do you imagine as the audience for this book?

TEH: I would hope that those interested in feminist literature would read it. We’ve got a number of people who’ve been interested in women in Islam, and ‘A’ishah’s work is an amazing resource for looking at a woman scholar, and issues regarding women and religion, certainly in classical Islam, but I would also say Islam and religion in general.

The Principles of Sufism is important for two additional reasons. One, here we have a woman writer, so you can at least get some idea of what she believed, and what her background and sources were. Secondly, in terms of Islamic mysticism in general, Principles of Sufism is a valuable book for showing us what sources and resources were available. What part of the tradition is she tapping into? Because she quotes her sources, we know that she’s reading the classics of Islamic mysticism, like the epistle by al-Qushayri and reading contemporary poets, or poets who were nearly contemporary with her, and quoting them. So you can see what she’s reading. And I think that’s important for seeing, at least in her case, how that tradition is manifesting and developing itself in Cairo and Syria in a very important time in Islamic history.

AL: And historians?

Also—she’s interacting with men. We don’t see any sign of anyone being upset about this in the circles in which she operated in Cairo and Damascus. 

TEH: In terms of history, you have an educated woman, and here’s what she studied, and here’s who she interacted with. Also—she’s interacting with men. We don’t see any sign of anyone being upset about this in the circles in which she operated in Cairo and Damascus. This is telling you something about social relations. She is a singular source, for if you want to understand an educated woman, who are you going to read? You can read men talking about women, and historians have used these. But here you have a woman talking about herself.

AL: Are there other audiences who would be interested?

TEH: I would think, too, that you do have a lot of men and women who are looking to their own self-help or spiritual development. And if they’re concerned with Islam, this is an invaluable resource.

AL: Or even for those who aren’t specifically interested in spiritual guidance, it is certainly uplifting.

TEH: What I like about the Library of Arabic Literature is that we’re editing and translating the text and it’s in its complete form. We’re not dumbing it down, we’re not editing it out, we’re not eliding certain elements a general readership wouldn’t like or appreciate. And I think that’s very important. Because ‘A’ishah was a scholar, she is writing for other scholars, but she’s also writing for the spiritual novice who wants to understand what to do in order to let go of selfishness and find grace.

Perhaps the most cringe-worthy part of ABC Family’s “Alice in Arabia” announcement was its creator’s apparent assertion that she had written the show not just for the fame and fortune (a motive we can all understand), but “to give Arabs and Muslims a voice on American TV”: 

As a number of observers have pointed out (for instance novelist Laila Lalami), Muslims and Arabs do…etc., etc., etc.

As the Itinerant Cook notes below, the project has been scrapped following signicant backlash.

To be clear: Criticizing “Alice in Arabia” (then or now) is not to say that non-Arabs and non-Muslims shouldn’t write Muslims and Arabs into their fictions. Our worlds are inextricably entangled, and thus we should show up in one another’s imaginations, as Kamila Shamsie discussed in Guernica two years back. Pale-skinned people should write brown-skinned people into their fictions. Men should write women into their fictions, and occasionally do a lovely job of it — as in Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman.

Also: Translators do important work re-vocalizing work originally written in Arabic (or Bengali or German or…). Still, the voice isn’t so much being “given” as being “re-crafted” in another language’s clothing.

And so: To state the obvious, suggesting that a military cryptologist (or university Arabist, or Arabic-speaking social worker, or itinerant blogger) can “give Arabs and Muslims a voice” certainly suggests that these aforementioned Arabs and Muslims cannot quite make intelligible sounds on their own.

Perhaps the show’s creator never made that statement. And now the show’s a no-go. Plus, it doesn’t bear refuting. Yet one always likes a good (unnecessary) listicle:

Fawzia Abu Khaled (1959 – present). Although poetry probably can’t be turned into an ABC Family show, poems by the remarkable Abu Khaled — lauded by Adonis, among others — can nonetheless be found in Mothers and Daughters in Arab Women’s Literature and in Gathering the Tide.

Dr. Aisha Al Mana and Dr. Hissa Al Sheikh. Their book, which documents the first demonstration to lift the ban on Saudi women driving on November 6th, 1990, is being translated by Saudi (female) blogger Eman al-Nafjan, who has posted an excerpt on her blog. Eman al-Nafjan, who blogs in English at saudiwoman.me, is another Saudi woman writer worth reading. Perhaps she could also do a screenplay.

Badriyah al-Bishr (1967-present). Al-Bishr’s latest novel, Love Stories on al-Aisha Street, was longlisted for the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. One of her short stories is in Voices of Change: Short Stories by Saudi Arabian Women Writers, along with work by Jamilah Fatani, Najat Khayyat, Jamilah Fatani, Rajaa Alem, and others.

Leila al-Johani (1969-present). Critic Fakri Saleh writes that “Two female Saudi writers took the responsibility to experiment with style – Rajaa Alem and Laila Al-Johani.” Read an excerpt from her novel Jahiliya, trans. Piers Amodia. The full novel is forthcoming, in translation, from BQFP.

Rajaa Alem (1970-present). Alem has co-translated two of her novels (Fatima: A Novel of Arabia and My Thousand & One Nights: A Novel of Mecca) with Tom McDonough. Her International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning novel The Dove’s Necklace, trans. Adam Talib and Katherine Halls, should be forthcoming any moment now from Duckworth.

Rajaa Al-Sanea (1981-present) Al-Sanea’s only novel, Girls of Riyadh, published in Arabic in 2005 and English in 2007 (somewhat controversially, because of translation issues), has been extremely popular and has been credited with starting a new wave of Saudi girl-lit. No excerpt from Girls of Riyadh immediately apparent online, just a few quotes on Goodreads. Actually, now that I think of it, perhaps Girls of Riyadh could lend itself to an ABC Family TV show….

On March 22 and 23, Ain Shams University’s Department of English Language and Literature held a two-day conference in honour of Professor Radwa Ashour. Contributor Amira Abd El-Khalek reports from the first day:

By Amira Abd El-Khalek

Photo credit: Amira Abd El-Khalek.

I look upon Radwa Ashour seated in the second row of the auditorium listening attentively. Her eyes wide behind her glasses, open, full of curiosity, filled with anticipation at what is going to be said. A small bouquet of flowers on her lap, she sits composed and modest, surrounded by colleagues, friends, and family. I look upon her and wonder at what she might be thinking as she listens to the panelists read, talk, praise, and analyse her writings and her life.

I think back on Radwa Ashour and her influence on my life and, though I had not seen her in a long time, I closely followed her news and her writings. I hold an infinite gratitude to her for having nurtured in me a political awareness, not just of Egypt but of the region, of Palestine, of our position in colonial and post-colonial discourse, and of African and Afro-American literature. Whenever I think of writing and the process of writing, I remember Radwa Ashour’s talks, both private and public, where she would describe what writing means to her.

Most importantly, she opened up the doors to a heritage of Arabic literature I was totally unaware of – seemingly strange for a professor of English literature in a department of English language and literature, but such is the multi-faceted Radwa Ashour.

Most importantly, she opened up the doors to a heritage of Arabic literature I was totally unaware of – seemingly strange for a professor of English literature in a department of English language and literature, but such is the multi-faceted Radwa Ashour.

Photo credit: Amira Abd El-Khalek

Ain Shams University’s department of English language and literature has organised a two-day conference in honour of Radwa Ashour, entitled ‘Radwa Ashour: Writer and Critic’. Guests and scholars included professors and MA students from Ain Shams, Cairo, Tanta, Alexandria and Sohag Universities, the American University in Cairo, the British University in Egypt, and Charles University in the Czech Republic. The keynote speakers are Professor Ferial Ghazoul from the American University in Cairo and Professor Youmna El Eid from the Lebanese University. That is, in addition to Mourid Barghouti and Tamim Barghouti, whose presence added a personal flavour to the day. The aim of the conference is to honour Radwa Ashour, but to also bring forth and encourage more research comprising Ashour’s works and interests.

The Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Prof. Abdel Razek Barakat, gave a very interesting opening speech, linking Radwa Ashour to the sufi tradition, an aspect I had never heard of before in reference to her. He drew from the words of Ibn Ataa’ Allah El-Sakandari, Ibn Arabi, al-Hallaj, Aba Hayyan al-Tawheedi and others to illustrate her vast knowledge, her passion for writing and research, her perseverance, her endurance of pain, and confrontation of adversity.

In her keynote address, Professor Ferial Ghazoul discussed her long relationship with the multiple and singular Radwa. She described how Radwa’s passion for writing emerges from a fear of a lurking death, in a metaphoric sense, a fear of “life burial and assassination of potential.”

Ghazoul portrayed a woman difficult to contain in one category: a professor, editor, critic, novelist, activist and translator.

Ghazoul portrayed a woman difficult to contain in one category: a professor, editor, critic, novelist, activist and translator. The triple suppression that haunts Radwa has made her particularly sensitive to the voiceless and dispossessed and marginalized. Ghazoul ends her keynote address accentuating the multiple talents and singular presence of Radwa Ashour: “noble in spirit, steadfast in temperament and comely in appearance.” She makes us feel her unique and singular presence by nurturing our hopes and dreams and bringing out the best in us, urging us to march on.

Photo credit: Amira Abd El-Khalek.

The three panels of the day, which alternated between English and Arabic, went into more detail on specific works of Radwa Ashour within a wider critical, literary and political context. The first panel was on renegotiating modernity and modernism, exploring alternative histories, viable modernities, post-colonial writing and the “dark middle ages.” It whisked me back to the days when I was a student and lecturer at the university — those good old days when we learnt first-hand from Radwa Ashour and Edward Said who would often visit Egypt to give talks.

The second panel explored a new Arabo-Islamic Narrative. Mona Tolba, from the Arabic department, spoke passionately about “The Book” as a holy text and books in Ashour’s Granada Trilogy, stressing that the true character in Granada is the language and the defeat of culture rather than the defeat of power as shown through the references to the books in the novel: protecting, preserving, and burying them to eventually bring them to the light.

The third panel focused on the female characters in Radwa Ashour’s novels and the feminism prevalent in her writings. The panelists, in addition to Professor Mustafa Riad, who examined Ashour’s westward travels as a student, determined to provide a voice to the marginalized rather than to follow the American dream, were three young female scholars who explored Ashour’s female characters within the political context of her novels.

The testimonies were the most moving part of the day. There were both live testimonies from the audience and those recorded on video from those who couldn’t make it to the conference.

The testimonies were the most moving part of the day. There were both live testimonies from the audience and those recorded on video from those who couldn’t make it to the conference. The videos ranged from testimonies of readers, friends and students of Radwa Ashour, to a young woman from Palestine, to Chopin’s nocturne played in her honour. They were touching words spoken from the heart, filled with love and hope and gratitude.

It was a conference, rich in content, and even richer in the love and dedication reflected in the students and colleagues of Radwa Ashour, young and old, those present, those who were not able to be there in person, those who have read her works and have learnt from her without ever having met her, and the passion of those who have had the privilege to work with her and be close to her. This was all reflected in a single day at a time when standards and ethics and a passion for reading and for research and for teaching seem to be muddled up in a chaotic plethora of disappointments and disintegration of values. It was a ray of hope and a sweet promise that there is a lot of good in this world and that the labour of love of one remarkable person in every little and big thing she does holds a lot of weight and value.

Editor’s note: Radwa Ashour’s Woman from Tantoura is forthcoming in translation momentarily, from AUC Press.

More on Ashour:

Writing, Teaching, Living: Egyptian Novelist Radwa Ashour

Barbara Romaine on Translating Radwa Ashour

Winners of Al Owais Award Include Novelist Radwa Ashour, Poet Mohammad Ali Shamsuddin

Radwa Ashour’s ‘Siraaj’: A Trip into the Past that Ends in the Present

Radwa Ashour on the Train of Images in the Egyptian Revolution

Amira Abd El-Khalek studied English literature and anthropology in Egypt and the UK. She has held academic positions at Ain Shams University and the American University in Cairo and has worked in national and international NGOs. She is an avid reader in English and Arabic, enjoys writing and is passionate about films.

On Nov. 10, Mona Kareem will give a talk at Binghamton University on how Gulf women writers adopt — or challenge — nationalist narratives:

How, Kareem asks, do women writers deal with blacks, migrants, and stateless individuals? What kind of feminist positions are taken within their discussions of racism? Can citizen-women offer an alternative history or new narratives on issues of slavery, migrant labor, and statelessness?

Kareem is herself stateless, a poet and writer who has brought out two collections of Arabic poetry, and is currently a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Program at Binghamton University. She also blogs at monakareem.blogspot.com.

Kareem and ArabLit emailed about the issues that will be raised in her talk tomorrow. Of course, if you’re in the Binghamton area at 1 o’clock on Monday, Nov. 10, please do go.

ArabLit: What initially brought you to this topic? Were there ways in which Gulf women writers were writing alternative histories or challenging the ways in which race and belonging are inscribed in the larger nationalist narratives?

Mona Kareem: Certainly I have my personal reasons to take on such project, being a stateless woman myself and a woman writer from the Gulf. Yet, I am also hoping to address a gap in western and local scholarships on this literature; what is Gulf literature, how was this category created, what positions it had in relation to nation-formations. I specifically focus on women’s literature to first challenge problematic approaches that 1) imagine women in the Gulf as only citizens and middle-class and 2) romanticize their writings and struggles, reinforcing the victimization narrative. Feminist scholars (post-colonial or US women of color) have shown us that women have aligned with men of their class/race/religion more than women across these divisions. This critique is crucial and in need of being examined in this context.

Yes, Gulf women writers are writing alternative histories, in which they get to centralize their subjectivity and experiences. Some writings are powerful in their positionality; as they show the ways racism and sexism intertwine. This intervention is crucial as it reminds us that every feminism should inherently be anti-racist. Yet, even in such writings, the national processes of racialization, and what I call the “citizen’s gaze” are both present and reproduced on different levels. In many cases, women writers have produced writings on subaltern groups and the nation in the same problematic ways present in their national literatures.

AL: What writers are you particularly looking at? Why these writers?

MK: Layla Juhani, Badriyya al-Bishr, Fawziyya al-Salim, Taiba al-Ibrahim, Fatma al-Shidy, Sa’adiah Mfarih, and S’ahad al-Fadhli, among others. All of the texts selected discuss the intersections of gender, race, and citizenship to different degrees. They are all contemporary writers who have produced works on society and the nation from varying positions. There are the rising middle-class Saudi women writers, then the upper class nationalist Kuwaiti writers, and also stateless poets. I am aiming to bring a variety of genres and forms to examine this body of literature contextually and inter-textually.

AL: Have you interviewed the authors to ask their take on how they address belonging? Do you plan to?

MK: I have not interviewed any of the writers. I try to separate the authorial self from the text, not to fall for the trap of the post-colonial writer as a national speaker. Yet, I hope to interview some regarding certain issues, especially when it comes to investigating reactions to their works and the politics of distributing them.

AL: Who is reading these books? What sort of effect do you think “mere fiction” by “just women” has on larger social debates and discussions of who matters and who doesn’t?

MK: This is what I meant by politics of distribution; the literary economy in which these texts exist. I stand by this position that after all these are fictional accounts. Yet, all national narratives are fictional too. So I hope to see how this literature reproduces and shifts the national narrative. To remember that these are fictional narratives that are read on a very limited scale (numbers of copies, issues of accessibility) is crucial to criticizing the way they are approached as experiments of gender relations in Gulf societies. I also hope to see how these works travelled across languages and how their translations sometimes recycled them for a western audience.

AL: Do you think women’s narratives are more or less radical than men’s? Or does it not fall along gender lines?

MK: I do not think gender “already” decides the level of each text. However, in the context of Gulf women’s literature, some of these narratives are powerful in tackling certain issues. For example, al-Bishr in “Gharamiyat Shari’ al-A’asha” does not tell us things that were not present in other Saudi novels on gender-relations and family structure, yet she brings a wonderful account on the Saudi state and modernity from a gender perspective; criticizing how modernity has facilitated the monitoring of women’s bodies in public and private domains. Feminist subjectivities are important in creating such accounts, as they historicize certain transitions and shifts through everyday encounters.

AL: To what extent when racial oppression is portrayed are racist ideas being re-inscribed and to what extent do you find they’re being challenged?

MK: This was an important factor in choosing the works for this project. I honestly have found many writings that have had blatant racist ideas, specifically short stories by Emirati women writers on existing in the “post-oil” city. The xenophobia is straightforward and does not differ much from the everyday racist discourses we grow up hearing in the Gulf (example: migrants are taking over our city. There is a “demographic imbalance”!!).

Other writings do not fall in such racist discourses, yet they offer exits in issues of discrimination through discourses of “sameness” and “unity.” I criticize these notions too as they come off like calls for assimilation (at best).

AL: Does censorship play a role here? Internal or external?

MK: It is scary to get into authorial intentions. I try to bring the issue of censorship when discussing reception of these works. Surely, I see self-censorship present in some works, when for example the author suddenly stops in describing a sexual encounter, or in positioning the state in opposition to women, rather than males.

AL: So, what’s the answer? Can citizen-women offer an alternative history or new narratives on issues of slavery, migrant-labor and statelessness? :-)

MK:  :D yes they are offering new narratives. I specifically like the example of Fatma al-Shidi’s novel Haflat al-Moot as it brings a rare narrative on enslaved women in the domestic sphere, and how they are hypersexualized and dehumanized by both “free” men and women. It is really interesting that Omani women writers were the first to speak on such subjects, although other attempts were not this critical (and sometimes racist). These narratives bring the gender perspective into national literatures, yet this perspective does not always take into consideration how gender takes different positions when met with axes of race and citizenship.

In 2014, ArabLit did a very popular “Year of Reading Arab Women.” A number of readers asked for a follow-up in 2015. 

Here, nine acclaimed Arab women writers choose favorite novels by other Arab women writers.

>Recommendation from Mansoura Ezz Eldin

Hoda Barakat’s Stone of Laughter (English version available from Interlink, trans. Sophie Bennett)

“The novel that I’ve loved the most by an Arab woman writer is Hoda Barakat’s Stone of Laughter, which I read for the first time when the Egyptian edition was issued in 1998, and this was the first time I knew her writing. I bought it during the last two years of exams during university from a newspaper-and-bookseller who stood in front of the University of Cairo’s main gate, after its cover grabbed my attention.

“I read the first pages and couldn’t leave the book until I had finished it. Akthough I had an important exam the next day, I spent my night with the protagonist Khalil, and sympathized with him, and tried to see the world through his eyes.

“I loved the way Hoda Barakat revealed her protagonist gradually, just as I loved the images of Beirut at the center of the craziness of the game of war, and I saw in the Beirut of the Stone of Laughter any city in a similar situation.

“Even now, I still appreciate The Stone of Laughter and see it as one of Hoda Barakat’s strongest works.”

~

>Recommendation from Miral al-Tahawy

Duna Ghali’s Orbits of Loneliness (2013)

Truth is, there is a long list of Arab women’s work that I’m sure was important in the history of my reading, but what I remember is the last text I read that had a profound impact on me, and that’s Duna Ghali’s “Orbits of Loneliness,” a novel that tells about the narrator’s relationship to her young child during a time of war and siege in Iraq, both before and after the US military invasion.

The novel describes the complex relationship between a mother and her son, the loneliness and togehterness, the fears and harsh life under siege. It is a feminist novel that in incisive and bold in its psychologyical complexity, unprecedented exploration in modern Arabic literature.

More on Orbits of Loneliness:

An excerpt from the book, trans. Maia Tabet, is available on the Banipal website.

It was also one of novelist Ibrahim Farghali’s choices for his “favorites of 2013.”

>Recommendation from Iman Mersal

Hoda Barakat’s work, especially The Stone of Laughter and The Tiller of Waters, stand among my favourite works by modern Arab female writers. It’s not just the way she narrates the civil war or the madness of Beirut, but her humour, cynicism and first and foremost, her originality.

Another whose work I admire is Safinaz Kazem. When I was a young writer in my 20s, I would never have been able to admit this, as the Islamic ideology behind her work stood as a barrier between it and me. I read her 1970 Romantikeyyat, an account of her years in America as a young student, while working on my PhD dissertation on Arab Travel Narratives of America. Other female writers I read  would be filter their experiences through some ideological lense or another, as if they had left their bodies at home. Kazem’s account, on the other hand, was one of a transformative journey that made me read the entirety of her oeuvre with great relish. Likewise, there are memoirs written by some Arab female writers that deserve mention, even if one isn’t a fan of their work as a whole: Hamlat taftish: Awraq shakhsiya (1992), by Latifa Zayat, ِAwraqi…Hayati (1995), by Nawal El Saadawi, and Alaa al- Jisr (1986) by Aisha Abd al-Rahman (also known as Bint al-Shati). One feels, in these works, that the authors speak in their own voices, unfettered by the collective will or collective projects so present in their other writings.

>Recommendation from Inaam Kachachi

Rasha Al Ameer’s Judgement Day (translated into the English by Jonathan Wright)

“I consider يوم الدين, (Dar Al-Jadeed, 2002) the book of the Lebanese writer Rasha Al Ameer, the fiction that one should read.”

• “Translated into French by Youssef Seddik as Le dernier jour: confessions d’un imam, Paris: Actes Sud, 2009.
• “Translated into English by Jonathan Wright. Judgment Day: A Modern Arabic Novel, Oxford University Press, 2011.”

More on Judgment Day:

‘Judgment Day': A Conversation About Poetry, the Quran, and the Future of Arabic

Review of Rasha al-Ameer’s ‘Judgment Day,’ trans. Jonathan Wright

Q & A: On Translating Rasha al-Ameer’s ‘Judgment Day’

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>Recommendations from Adania Shibli

Iman Mersal’s A Dark Alley Suitable for Learning to Dance and Walking As Long As Possible, as well as Samira Azzam’s The Clock and the Man.

“Books I cherish and in fact allowed me finally to appreciate Arabic poetry are two collections by Iman Mersal:

• ممر معتم يصلح لتعلم الرقص، دار شرقيات، القاهرة، طبعة أولى 1995.
• المشي أطول وقت ممكن، دار شرقيات، القاهرة، 1997.

1. الساعة والإنسان ـ المؤسسة الأهلية للطباعة ـ بيروت 1963″

A number of Mersal’s poems were collected into These Are Not Oranges, My Love, trans. Khaled Mattawa. You can read some of the poems on Blackbird. 

I don’t believe a collection of Azzam’s work has ever been translated, although her stories can be found in a few collections, such as Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women. You can also watch a short film based on the short story “The Man and the Clock.”

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>Recommendation from Iman Humaydan

Alia Mamdouh’s The Passion 

“Alia Mamdouh was my great discovery — her book al-Wala3 (published in 1993). You cannot imagine how beautiful this book is.”

This novel is available in French translation as La Passion and Mamdouh’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal-winning The Loved Ones is avaiable in English (trans. Marilyn Booth) and her Napthalene is available in English (trans Peter Theroux).

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>Recommendation from Fatima Sharafeddine

The Granada Trilogy, by Radwa Ashour

Only the first part of the trilogy — named one of the top 105 books of the 20th century by the Arab Writers Union — is available in English translation, by William Granara.

More on Ashour:

Beloved Egyptian Novelist Radwa Ashour, 1946-2014

‘I Would Like To Be Radwa Ashour’

Radwa Ashour and Mourid Barghouti on the Responsibilities of Writers

‘Whenever I Think of Writing…I Remember Radwa Ashour’

Barbara Romaine on Translating Radwa Ashour

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>Recommendations from Ghada Abdel Aal

Radwa Ashour’s The Granada Trilogy and Sahar Mandour’s I’ll Draw a Star on Vienna’s Forehead.

Mandour was born in Beirut in 1977 to an Egyptian father and a Lebanese mother. She studied psychology at L’Universite Saint Joseph in Beirut and afterwards worked as a journalist.

Her first novel, I’ll Draw a Star on Vienna’s Forehead, was published in Beirut in 2007. This was followed by A Beiruti Love and 32, both of which were bestsellers at the 2009-2010 Arab Book Fair in Beirut. Her fourth novel, Mina, was about a young gay actress living in Beirut.

More from Mandour:

World Literature Today: Hayat (an excerpt from 32)

ArteEast: Excerpts from Sahar Mandour’s 32

Jadaliyya: Excerpt from 32

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>Recommendations from Reem Bassiouney

Sahar Khalifeh, Latifa Zayyat’s The Open Door and Salwa Bakr

“The Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh — her novels are all good. And the Egyptian novelist Latifa Zayyat’s The Open Door. Also the short stories of Salwa Bakr.”

Khalifeh’s Door to the Courtyard is perhaps her most acclaimed work. Bab el-Saha, however, has not yet been translated into English. You can find it in German as Das Tor (Unionsverlag, 2004) and French as L’impasse de bab essaha (Flammarion, 1998).

Still, you can find at least these five novels by Khalifeh in English: Of Noble Origins (trans. Aida Bamia, AUC Press), The Inheritance (trans. by Aida Bamia, AUC Press); Wild Thorns (trans. Trevor Legassick and Elizabeth Fernea, Interlink); The End of Spring (trans. Paula Haydar, Interlink); and The Image, the Icon and the Covenant (trans. by Aida Bamia, Interlink).

Latifa Zayyat’s The Open Door is also available in translation from Marilyn Booth, and a collection of Salwa Bakr’s stories, The Wiles of Men and Other Stories was translated by Denys Johnson-Davies and published by AUC Press.

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>Recommendation from Jana Elhassan

Lina Hoyan El Hassan’s Nazek Khanum

“Lina Hoyan El Hassan the Syrian writer, I loved her novel Nazek Khanum. It is smooth and entertaining and the main character was depicted very well.”

None of Lina Hoyan El Hassan’s (sometimes El Hosn) work has been translated into English. El Hassan was born in Syria in 1977 and studied philosophy at the University of Damascus. Her first novel, Girl of the Sun, was published in 1998, and Nazek Khanum is her most recent. She has left Syria and is currently working and writing in Beirut.