For International Women’s Day, ArabLit contributor Norah Alkharashi has put together a list of Arabophone women poets who may be acclaimed in Arabic, but are little-known in English:

By Norah Alkharashi

Poetry by Fadwa Touqan, art from Watan, available at www.watanpalestine.com.

Like poetry, Arabic literature lives at the margins of the Anglophone book market and literary scene. The marginalization of both, it seems, comes down to assumed expectations of what the general reader wants to read. Poetry as a genre remains widely invisible in translation, even moreso if it is from a less-translated language like Arabic and from the muted voices of women.

The publication of English translations of women’s Arabic poetry in book form, accordingly, is close to nothing compared to what is really produced in Arabic. But the good news is, with the impact of computer technologies, a number of poems are published online.

The list of five below combines female Arabic poets from different places and generations, although they are all writing now. What unifies them is that they are promising and acclaimed poets, yet surprisingly little-known in English. This collection of short poems, found in Banipal and Words Without Borders, will allow you to enjoy a different angle on Arabic literature. 

Rasha Omran, “When Longing Tormented Me” 

This poem, translated by Camilo Gomez-Rivas, was published in Spring 2005 in Banipal.

Rasha Omran (1964- ) is a well-known Syrian poet and an intellectual. She published five poetry books between 1980 and  2014 and is also the author of An Anthology of Syrian Poetry, 1980 – 2008. She is an activist who has spoken up for the civilians in Syria and against the regime, and she had to flee her hometown of Damascus for Cairo in 2012.

Rasha says that poetry “does not reveal itself to you with happiness or gain. Poetry always springs from the darkest areas in our subconscious, which lives on the anticipation of loss. Loss is what makes up the chemistry of poetry.” (Alarab newspaper, 20/01/2015, issue: 9803, my translation). 

Rana al-Tonsi, “A Rose for the Last Days“

This poem, translated by Sinan Antoon, was published in Spring 2006, also in Banipal. 

Rana al-Tonsi (1981- ) was born in Cairo and currently lives Doha, Qatar.  She published eight poetry books between 2005 and 2015, and her works are widely acclaimed in the Arab world. Her style is descried as both intimate and rebellious — she has a special, intimate relationship with the Arabic language and she rebels against the traditions and expectations of previous collective generations.

Her poetry is an individual experience that speaks of her times and generation. On poetry, she writes “It is my only wing that flutters, my dry voice. Poetry is all that I do not have, but somehow I own.” (Assafir newspaper, 14/11/2014, p. 10, [my translation])

Nujoom al-Ghanem, “A Night Heavy on the Night – Two Poems” 

These poems were translated by Khaled al-Masri and published in Banipal in 2011.

Nujoom al-Ghanem (1962- ) is a full-time poet from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She published six poetry collections between 1989 and 2008, and she also directed nine movies and short films.

When al-Ghanem started writing poetry, female poets were not expected to publish using their names in the newspapers. Due to her conservative upbringing, she had to wait several years before pushing through. Her themes open a dialogue with Sufism, spirituality, postmodernism, and philosophy. She describes her writing style: “I made a decision and I stopped imitating rhythmic or structured verses, and I became faithful to only to free-verse poems.” (Ana Zahra magazine, 24/09/2010, [my translation])

Reem Ghanayem, “Mag, fi Sirat al-Manafi – Selected poems“

These  poems, published in Banipal in 2012, were self-translated. 

Reem Ghanayem (1982- ) was born, and still lives, in the he village of Western Baqa inside the Green Line in Palestine. She has published two poetry collections, and also produces translations from English literature including James Joyce and Charles Bukowski. 

Soukaina Babiballah, “Anatomy of the Rose“

This poem, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zaid, was published in Words Without Borders in March 2016.

Soukaina Babiballah (1989- ) is a young, promising poet and novelist from Casablanca, Morocco. She has two published poetry collections and also won an Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) grant for the organization’s novel-writing program, which resulted in her first novel, Bait Alqashlah, by Arabic Scientific Publishing in 2016.

Norah Alkharashi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Translation Studies and a translator. Twitter: @norahmodi.

Best-selling Kuwaiti author Bothayna al-Essa was recently part of this year’s Emirates LitFest as well as the AUK Biennial LitFest:

In the second installment of a special feature on the journeys of Arab women writers, ArabLit’s Sawad Hussain sat down with al-Essa, whose novel Maps of Wandering was one of the top sellers of 2016 at book fairs and online retailers.

Tomorrow, ArabLit will run an excerpt from Maps of Wandering, trans. Hussain.

Sawad Hussain: Music, painting, dancing are all forms of art and self-expression. Why writing?

The author speaking at this year’s Emirates LitFest. Photo credit: Sawad Hussain.

Bothayna al-Essa: I don’t think I had a say in the matter of me writing or not.  Writing is the way in which I can express myself fully. My relationship with the words is more than any other form of expression. I think it’s also a matter of how I was brought up. As a child, I studied the Quran and memorized it. There were certain public opinions that were against the other forms of expression. So writing was the only one that hadn’t been declared taboo.

Also, I like the sounds, the letters themselves. I like the strange energy that comes from fusing one letter with the next, one word with the next.

SH: What do you consider your greatest achievement as a writer?

BE: I think the life of a writer is one of continuous attempts. There is always something that we learn, something we achieve and something we fail at. But to be honest I don’t treat the act of writing with the logic of success and failure. I don’t want to see it from this perspective. For me, it’s about experimentation and making attempts, to answer questions and to pose them. That’s it. If we follow this logic, then every book hits the target that it’s meant to.

SH: What was your aim in writing I Grew Up and Forgot How to Forget?

BE: The goal of this book was to lay bare the reality of oppression, especially the oppression of women. I think in my previous works I would go in circles around this topic, but I was scared to broach it with this level of clarity and transparency. Maybe simply because we as women don’t like to portray ourselves as the perpetual victim or the oppressed female. In this novel I decided to go directly to the heart of the matter that was nagging at me.

SH: What was your family’s reaction to the book?

BE: My family isn’t really into literature. They’re more interested in business. Since the beginning, it’s not just with this book, but rarely there’s a book that my family reads the whole way through. My mom and my sister are the only ones who read my work from my household. Their feedback was really positive.

SH: You’ve established Takween, a performance space, bookshop, and a school for budding writers. What advice do you give them?

BE: I always advise them to do four things. The first thing is to read. It’s impossible to be an authentic writer without being a serious reader. Even for us to write one word, we have to have read hundreds before that.

The second thing is to interact with writing like a muscle that needs to be exercised and strengthened. One has to engage in writing exercises on a continuous basis. Even if they’re just simple exercises, they’ll keep us ‘fit’ as writers. And they’ll help us develop our tools as writers.

The third thing is that we need solitude to create. The way the world works — it’s designed such that we’re transformed into consumers, and it consumes the individual by making them into a consumer. By entering into this cycle, we lose ourselves and the true voice we hear in our heads when we experience setbacks in this world. It’s upon the writer — all of us actually, not just writers — but writers in particular to go up against this way of life.

The final thing is that we need a lot of dialogue. To hear other perspectives and opinions. I learn from reading, but certainly I learn a lot more when I discuss with someone what I’ve read.

SH: Which of your novels do you hold dearest?

BE: Maps of Wandering. I think because I matured whilst writing it, as a writer, technically, and as a person. I jumped outside of the usual concerns of a Gulf woman. The subject matter itself — there was a lot of challenge and enjoyment in it.

SH: Two of your novels are currently being looked at by different publishing houses to be translated into English. What is your opinion on the act of translation?

BE: I look at translation as a way of reaching readers that I didn’t originally intend to communicate with. Maybe they don’t belong to this region, don’t share the same issues, don’t share the same religion, but it’ll be interesting for me to see how these new readers receive my stories.

SH: What are you writing now?

BE: I’m working on a novel. But I’m yet to finish it.

SH: Is the style of the novel similar to your previous ones?

BE: The style is closer to Maps of Wandering than my other novels. It should be published later this year from the same publishing house. It delves into the current political climate in Kuwait and how this is reflected in our households and everyday lives.

SH: What are you reading at the moment?

BE: I’m reading Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Emerald Mountain. We had a shared panel where we got to know each other, and we thought it’d be a good idea to read each other’s books.

SH: Do you have a routine when you write?

BE: I have a routine when I write, but it differs from novel to novel. So for Maps of Wandering, I used to write in the mornings until nighttime. With the novel I’m working on right now, I find myself in the bookstore of Takween every morning. So because I have work in the morning, and my children to take care of when they come back from school, with homework and so on, most of the time I start writing from 8pm until midnight.

SH: How do you find the time to write? You’re a mother, you have Takween… 

BE: It’s a matter of being organized. It’s not an issue of not having enough time. Just being organized. I’ve written in worse conditions where there were more demands on my time. What really scares me is that one day I won’t be able to write. Because of this fear, I always find time, even if it’s just one hour, to write. If I don’t write, it has an impact on my life, my temperament.

SH: Do you feel relaxed when you write?

BE: It’s tiring and relaxing at the same time!

SH: When you’re done with your first draft, do you show it to anyone? If so, who?

BE: Yes, definitely, at least five people. For Maps of Wandering, I shared the drafts with a number of people. For example, I gave it to Mohammed Hassan Alwan because in the novel there are some sections from his hometown in Saudi Arabia. Some of the reviewers were my friends and others were writers whose opinion I value, whom I approached to take a look at my work.

SH: Do you end up making edits based on their recommendations?

BE: Yes of course. If it will make the book better, I am more than open to making edits.

Note: This interview took place in Arabic and was translated by Sawad Hussain.

Sawad Hussain is a Cambridge-based editor-at-large for ArabLit who is also an Arabic translator and litterateur who holds a MA in Modern Arabic Literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies.  She is passionate about all things related to Arab culture, history and literature. 

In the the 1980s, novelist Salwa Bakr said, “Every day you would open the window and find a female author writing a new book.” This piece initially ran in November 2012 and is part of our lead-up to Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth):

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.

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 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.”

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.

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.

August is Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth). A look at literature in translation shows that women’s books represent only around 30% of titles published in translation in English. Efforts to shift the balance of work in translation — and attention to the the work in translation — have resulted in the lithub lists of women’s works to translate as well as the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, which recently announced its debut complete list of nominees: 

Although there has been more attention to women’s work in translation in the last three years, since the launch of #WITMonth, of the seventeen books entered for the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literature in Translation, just five were by women.

In 2017, there have been only a handful of books by Arab women in translation. But there should be an uptick — including several titles by Iman Mersal; Dima Wannous’ The Frightened, trans. Lissie Jaquette (Harvill Secker, 2019); Raja Alem’s Sarab, trans. Leri Price — forthcoming in the next two years.

As we look to titles by Arab women writers, it’s also important to consider the context, as Rafia Zakaria does in the recent, “When Arab women are translated into English, their context is cut away.”

Eight to look for soon:

France, Story of a Childhood, by Zahia Rahmani, trans. Laura Vergnaud (Yale University Press: 2016)

This is the only 2016 release on the list. As it was translated from French, it hasn’t previously been reviewed on ArabLit. But it caught our attention when it was recently longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award.

According to the publisher:

This moving tale of imprisonment and escape, persecution and loss, is narrated by the daughter of an alleged Harki, an Algerian soldier who fought for the French during the Algerian War for Independence. It was the fate of such men to be twice exiled, first in their homeland after the war, and later in France, where fleeing Harki families sought refuge but instead faced contempt, discrimination, and exclusion. Zahia Rahmani blends reality and imagination in her writing, offering a fictionalized version of her own family’s struggle. Lara Vergnaud’s beautiful translation from the French perfectly captures the voices and emotions of Rahmani’s childhood in a foreign land.

You can read more at PEN from Vergnaud about translating Rahmani.

Hend and the Soldiers, by Badriah Albeshr, trans. Sanna Dhahir (University of Texas Press: May 2017)

This novel by high-profile author and journalist Badriah Albeshr explores women’s lives in the Saudi’s repressive kingdom.

Albeshr was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 for her interesting, multilayered Love Stories on al-Asha Street. But as Al Monitor notes, it was her first novel, Hend and the Soldiers, that “provoked some indignant reactions in her native Saudi Arabia. While approved for sale, the book, which chronicles Saudi Arabian women’s day-to-day fight to earn more personal freedoms, was accused of deviating from the tenets of Islam, among other things.”

You can read an interview with translator Sanna Dhahir about the book, in which she says, “Albeshr’s work is groundbreaking in that it candidly expresses women’s need to have higher ceilings of freedom at home, at work, and in love; and it denounces religious extremism and the practices of the Saudi religious police.”

In addition to being an award-winning novelist, Albeshr is also an op-ed columnist. You can read several of her op-eds online.

Cigarette Number Seven by Donia Kamal, translated by Nariman Youssef (Hoopoe Fiction: December 2017)

From the publisher:

As a child, Nadia was left her with her grandparents in Egypt, while her mother sought work in the Gulf. Decades later, she looks back on her fragmented childhood from an uncertain present: it is 2011 and the streets have erupted in an unexpected revolution. Her activist father, the sole anchor in her life, encourages her to be a part of the protests and so Nadia joins the sit-in at Tahrir Square.

Donia Kamal’s succinct, candid prose draw us into Nadia’s world: from the private to the public; from the men she has loved and lost, to her participation in the momentous events of the Egyptian revolution. Stunning in its simplicity, Cigarette Number Seven is a deeply intimate novel about family and relationships in turbulent times.

You can also read Sherine Mazloum on Cigarette Number Seven and other women’s revolutionary novels in “To write/revolt: Egyptian women novelists writing the revolution.” And you can follow Kamal on Twitter.

The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt, by Arwa Salih, trans. Samah Selim (Seagull Books: December 2017)

The activist, theorist, and student-movement icon Arwa Saleh killed herself in 1997, the same year her Stillborn appeared. The ripples of Saleh’s echo in the writing community — she was also married to poet Mohab Nasr — continue to be felt.

Translator Samah Selim has taken on the job of bringing the text into English for Seagull Books. In a recent talk, Selim said, “The book is only 80 pages long. It is a relentless, sometimes wistful, sometimes bitter, often raging but always incisive critique…from what one could call a proto-feminist perspective.”

Hassan Khan writes more about Saleh and her “absolutely necessary” book in Bidoun.

The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, by Dunya Mikhail, trans. Max Weiss and Dunya Mikhail (New Directions: March 2018)

From the publisher:

Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women.

The Beekeeper, by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, tells the harrowing stories of several women who managed to escape the clutches of Daesh. Mikhail extensively interviews these women—who’ve lost their families and loved ones, who’ve been repeatedly sold, raped, psychologically tortured, and forced to manufacture chemical weapons—and as their tales unfold, an unlikely hero emerges: a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain, along with a wide network of transporters, helpers, and former cigarette smugglers, to bring these women, one by one, through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, back into safety.

In the face of inhuman suffering, this powerful work of nonfiction offers a counterpoint to Daesh’s genocidal extremism: hope, as ordinary people risk their lives to save those of others.

You can find out more about this work, and Mikhail, at the New Directions website.

The Apartment in Bab El Louk, by Donia Maher, Ganzeer &Ahmed Nady, trans. Elisabeth Jaquette  (Darf Publishers: April 2018)

 I have called the Arabic of this graphic novel a “fabulous noir poem,” and cannot but trust Jaquette to bring it into beautiful English. Winner of the Kahil Award for Best Graphic Novel, “even though,” Ganzeer writes, “it isn’t exactly a graphic novel.” One of the pioneers in graphic-novel hybridism in Arabic literature.

Maher, the author, received a production award from al-Mawred al-Thaqafy (Culture Resource) for The Apartment in Bab el-Louk.

You can read an excerpt at Words Without Borders.

 The Baghdad Clock, by  Shahad al Rawi, trans. Luke Leafgren (One World: September 2018)

At this year’s “Mutanabbi Street Starts Here” event in Dubai, where Shahad al Rawi now lives, the Iraqi novelist read from her popular 2006 novel. From the publisher’s description of this bestselling novel:

The novel is narrated by a young Iraqi girl and her best friend Nadia, who find themselves in an air-raid shelter in war-torn Baghdad during the first Gulf War. Populated by a host of colourful characters, we share the two girls’ dreams, music, school life and first loves as they grow up in a city torn apart by civil war. And as bombs fall, the international sanctions bite and friends begin to flee the country, the city services collapse while abandoned dogs roam the streets and fortune-tellers thrive amidst the fear and uncertainty.

Forthcoming from One World.

 The Sea Cloak, by Nayrouz Qarmout, trans. Perween Richards (Comma Press: 2018)

The Sea Cloak is a debut collection by a young Palestinian author who’s both a journalist and women’s rights campaigner. The stories in her forthcoming collection draw from her experiences growing up in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, as well as her current life in Gaza.

According to publisher Comma Press, “stitched together they create a patchwork of different perspectives into what it means to be a woman in Palestine today. Whether following the daily struggles of orphaned children fighting to survive in the rubble of recent bombardments, or mapping the complex, cultural tensions between different generations of refugees in wider Gazan society, these stories offer rare insights into one of the most talked about, but least understood cities in the Middle East.”

You can see the title story, trans. Charis Bredon, read by actor Grazyna Monvid on YouTube.

If you’re wondering why this list — and this month — exists, do read Elisabeth Jaquette’s “And the Prize for Women in Arabic Translation Goes To…No One?”

Th. Emil Homerin, editor-translator 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.

Originally published in 2014, this interview is a re-run for Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth).

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.

In what sort of language can an author write about something as banal and contested as menstruation? Should a character pee in colloquial Arabic or Modern Standard? In the first part of a two-part interview, which ArabLit is re-running for Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth), Rachael Daum discusses urinary-tract infections, menstrual blood, and language with acclaimed Lebanese novelist Alexandra Chreiteh:

By Rachael Daum

Chreiteh accepting an award for Always Coca Cola.

Something I really admire about both of your novels so far is your head-on approach to very, shall we say, earthly matters. In Always Coca-Cola, Abeer gets her period, and in Ali the protagonist is prone to UTIs, and you write very viscerally about the flow of blood and urine, respectively. I’m interested in this, and why you chose to have your readers confront these subjects? Particularly written in fus7a [Modern Standard Arabic]?

First of all, it is the source of a lot a lot of frustration for me — that is, I am really frustrated with the way that women are regulated in social and literary space. Women are always there as an erotic body, depicted in sexual ways, and naturally the issue of female desire is a big problem. There are of course female authors who write about female desire, and that’s great. But oftentimes women’s bodies are either sexualized or given a sort of sanctity, or both, and this sanctity is harmful. We, as Lebanese women, and I think as women in general, have to hide these things [such as periods and urination], we have to be ashamed of these things. The reality is that we deal with these things on a daily basis, and we need to explore them. I wanted to deal with the female body in a way that was explored not through someone else’s gaze.

I wanted a woman there just with her body, not constructing her identity against anyone or anything else. This is tricky, but I feel like it was important for me to give at least the protagonist agency over her own body, or to portray the ways in which women’s agency is complicated or lacking because of certain attitudes towards their bodies. I did not want to depict women as bad variations on men, which I feel is the way they are often portrayed in social space and discourse in Lebanon.

In Ali and His Russian Mother, it was very important for me to address a very certain type of heroic discourse. It’s used a lot in times of war. Of course the woman’s body is discussed there always as a metaphor — the female body that’s raped stands for the loss of sovereignty over land, or is killed to be conquered; [there’s] the mother’s body that gives the nation its sons. And I wanted to show something else, the actual physical needs of someone, a woman, going though war. I needed to talk about the real, everyday struggles of war, about the huge dissonance between the “un-noble” need to go to the bathroom and the noble-sounding calls to sacrifice oneself for one’s country. Of course, in times of war, women are the biggest losers, but they are often reduced to metaphors. They are rarely allowed to exist for themselves. I kept asking myself: when is blood pure and when is it impure? I needed to address the contrast between these two levels of existence and discourse.

And remember: talking about periods in fus7a is not insulting, because periods are not insulting!

You choose to write in fus7a about very colloquial matters. Why did you choose to do this?

This was the most important thing for me to deal with while I was writing. For me, fus7a is a very difficult tool to use. Writing in fus7a is always already a translation, because you need to translate your own thoughts into writing, and the fact that the pulse of everyday life does not flow through fus7a makes it rigid, especially when it comes to the description of the mundane. It is a question of who owns language and who owns the right to express herself or himself, to make space for herself in society and in literature. You can reach more people in fus7a than you can in dialect. It’s a kind of locus of power: the social structures of authority are recreated within language if you do nothing to stop that.

For me, the way to stop it was to write about young women in Beirut dealing with really important issues, and some unimportant issues, but all of these almost never make it into fus7a in the voice of these women. They are always represented by someone else, through the authority of someone else, and not through their own authority. To break the authority of language and of social space, I tried to infect fus7a with the music of these women’s own language, while bending fus7a to make it do what I wanted. Everyone can use fus7a — why should it only address very “noble” ideas and “noble” causes? Why should authority only be held by a certain group that has grammar and the legal system on their side?

And of course there are colloquialisms in the novel, and the mixture was very important to me. Lots of slang, too, which is also important—it’s very subversive. Periods are subversive, everything is subversive!

What is your relationship with Michelle Hartman, your translator, like? As with any translation project, there is conflict and collaboration; how do you navigate this, particularly as your English is very good and you have the luxury (or curse!) of being able to read the translation?

Michelle and I are very good friends! We talk a lot. I respect her work as a translator—she is so involved in the texts she translates, and it’s important for her to respect the author’s intention. (If there is any such intention!) Basically she wanted me to be as involved as I felt comfortable in the translation. And she didn’t want to take away another woman’s agency! The issue with the translation of Always Coca Cola for me was that, in the original text, I tried to make the prose as clear as possible, and to make it flow as well as possible. Michelle’s political position made her do something very different with the English text: I felt it was choppy and sometimes awkward, and it was part of her political work as a translator. For Michelle, translated texts by Arab women risk being treated as commodities to be consumed. One way she tries to avoid this is that she makes sure the reader always know it’s a translation, by not allowing her or him to have too smooth a ride. In the end, we realized that we were dealing with two different texts.

What is your opinion of the Arabic literature landscape at the moment? Do you get to read a lot outside of your graduate readings?

Anyone would tell you that they read much less than they’d like to. I think there are a lot of very interesting things happening at the moment. There’s a move towards different types of narration I haven’t seen before. And there’s a movement to questions of identity — with special approaches not typical of previous Arabic literature. And there’s a lot of young Arabic writers, and I love seeing how many more young writers there are every year. At the moment, I am reading a poetry collection by a young Egyptian poet, Iman Mersal. I think she has a bold, unique voice. I’m really excited to see where young Arabic literature will go, especially where women will go.

So what are you working on now? I know you are a doctoral candidate at Yale University—what’s your research in?

My current work is about magical realism in Arabic and Hebrew. Even when these two literatures don’t communicate, they use magical realism in very similar ways. For both, magical realism is a tool of expressing minor identities within the nation that are repressed by national identity. For example, the Tawariq identity in Libya for Ibrahim al-Koni and the Kurdish identity in Syria in the case of Salim Barakat. In Hebrew literature, these minorities are the Arab Jews and Palestinians, who write in Hebrew and use magical realism in order to represent their own repressed narratives and histories.

Alexandra Chreiteh is the author of two novels, Always Coca-Cola and Ali and his Russian Mother. She is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her work has been translated to English and German.

Rachael Daum is a graduate student at Indiana University inflicting Russian literature and language on herself, and vice versa. She is also the Publicity Manager for the American Literary Translators Association, and you can find her @Oopsadaisical.