Although the contributions of women writers to modern
Arabic literature constitute one of the most important features of that
literature, to date no map for interested scholars details the emergence and
development of their work. In the last half-century, Arab women writers have not
only entered the field of literature in ever-increasing numbers, but have also
distinguished themselves with an impressive richness and diversity in their
writing. They have demonstrated their talents mainly in the genres of the novel,
poetry, and the short story and will no doubt soon produce many new works in
others (such as drama/ as well-especially as their public mobility and access to
education improve further. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly the fact
that many early primary sources that such a study requires are out of print or
not widely available. The difficulty of obtaining primary sources and the
scarcity of scholarly works on them created quite a challenge in terms of this
study. I can only hope that, as interest in Arab women writers increases, more
of their work will be available to us and more books and articles will be
written about them. This book is one effort toward that goal, and assesses the
contributions of women to the Arabic novel /both in subject matter and in form/
up to the early 1980s.
Because
of the nature of the topic-the "formative years"the focus here is
narrowed to representative writers chosen from the Arab East (Egypt, Lebanon,
Syria, and Palestine) where the pioneering women's fiction was produced. The
number of women writers emerging in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and North Africa
is increasing rapidly. Any study of
Arab women's literary activity beyond the formative years will undoubtedly
include North African authors, who participated in the spirit of Arab revivalism
that swept postcolonial North Africa. Admittedly, the idea of "formative
years' as a single entity for
women's fiction in the Arab world is an artificial construct;
the "Arab world" is not a single monolithic entity whose
different components (be they religious, political, or social) are homogeneous
in their experiences and in how these experiences affect society. Therefore,
what in this book is addressed as the formative years is not uniform over the
broad expanse of the Arab world. For Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, for example,
the formative years of women's fiction writing may begin several decades later
than the formative years of Egyptian women's writing. The writers addressed in
this book have, however, had an effect on the formative years of women writers
in other parts of the Arab world, and as such, have earned a special place in
the history of Arabic literature.
I choose to discuss only novels written in Arabic
despite the fact that some interesting novels have been written in French and
English.' My choice to include only those novels written in Arabic is based upon
my interest in the interaction between Arabic novels and Arab society and
between women writers and the Arabic language itself. In the first place, the
shift from writing novels in a European language to writing novels in the Arabic
language may be seen as being emblematic of Arab society's shifting emphasis
from the focus on foreign customs to addressing local Arab issues. In addition,
novels published in Arabic are read mostly by Arab audiences and are thus much
more likely than other novels to be written specifically for Arab readers and to
have noticeable effects on Arab culture and politics. This, in turn, means that
they more directly comment upon and attempt to affect the status of Arab women
and of Arab women's writing in the writers' own cultures. In addition, Arabic
literature is subject to the rules of a tradition that holds the Classical
Arabic language to be sacred (meaning that changes in the formal language are
discouraged). This creates quite a challenge for women writers who, if they are
to find their voices, must change this patriarchal language that marginalizes
them and at the same time must make the language acceptable enough to be
published and read by a significant audience.
The focus on women novelists is not intended to imply
that gender in itself determines the nature of literary creation; rather, it
underscores differences in experience, differences that are manifested in
literature. For such an undertaking it is absolutely necessary to call upon
feminist literary theory because it supports a focus on women's literature where
women are at the center of the discussion, and it is a highly developed field
with many and varied resources available to scholars. However, feminist literary
theory is still mostly the domain of Western feminism, and we must therefore
remain mindful of the problems involved in applying theory developed in the West
to literature produced in the Arab world. Despite the impact of Western culture
on Arabs in most aspects of life, I still believe that there is a tremendous
risk involved in applying Western feminist theories and critical concepts to
Arab women's literature. That does not mean that those theories cannot be
valuable tools for interpreting certain literary phenomena and techniques. The
danger lies in imposing these theories indiscriminately on a literature which,
compared to Western literature, may have a different historical-cultural
context.
Fortunately, feminist theory, although certainly not
universally "true" in any single development or application, has a
builtin allowance for (and indeed, an insistence on) the contextualization of
theory, theorists, and subjects of study. This means that it is highly
adaptable. For example, in this book I characterize certain works written by
Arab women as "individualistic," a quality that has been associated
with Western patriarchal values. In the West, many social problems are
trivialized and ignored based on rhetoric about individual opportunity and
responsibility for one's own "success"; consequently, feminists and
other groups have struggled to organize around collective identity to resist
discrimination based on individual "freedom." However,
"individualistic" works by Arab women can be read as feminist in the
context of Arab culture. In that culture, collective ethnic and religious
identity conformity behaviors are highly valued by the power structure, and
therefore sexism is institutionalized through those values. For women to resist
oppression, they must resist the institutions that depend on it, and in fact the
Arab women's struggle against the patriarchal system began with the assertion of
their individuality and their individual rights--as reflected in the works by
Arab women during the 1950s and 1960s. Later works show an increase in concern
for national identity among these writers, and again we must understand the
context. Although this too is often viewed in the West as antifeminist (because
of the real presence in Western societies of nationalism based on a hierarchy of
cultures/, and this focus on national identity does seem to result in less
attention overall to feminist concerns in the writings discussed, many of the
writers were able to successfully deal with both in their works. Again, the two
are compatible here in the context of the national identity crisis in the Arab
world, which has been brought on by external pressure to remain separated by
geographic boundaries and to submit to other nations' anti-Arab prejudices and
activities, as opposed to the situation in the West, in which some cultures base
nationalistic feeling on their alleged superiority to others. Thus feminist
theory can be adapted to various circumstances to interpret and counter
oppression in its many forms.
Although the roots of Arab women's literature extend
back to the pre-Islamic dawn of Arab society, at the beginning of the Arab
cultural reawakening al-nah-dah the literary contributions of women were
nonetheless still meager as a result of social, religious, and economic factors.
These factors have not disappeared by any means; for example, the veil has made
a comeback recently in some Arab countries, and others never abandoned it.
(Indeed, any practice associated with religion is difficult to change.) Chapter
One provides some discussion of the history of the status of women in the Arab
world and of the modern women's movement there. That movement began to gather
momentum early in the nineteenth century when increased contact with the West
led Arab intellectuals to question the position of Arab women. These scholars
began to debate the reasons for the practices of veiling and denying education
to women, and they focused on the question of whether Islam itself required
these or whether the patriarchal system had imposed the restrictions on pseudo-religious
grounds. Chapter One traces the ensuing struggle over women's rights in the Arab
world, particularly the gradual improvement in women's access to education--the
first area in which women made significant gains (though less due to decreasing
sexism than to the spreading belief that inclusive education was necessary for a
strong nation). Progress with respect to the vote and election of women to
political office was slower and more sporadic, but was also an important facet
of the movement and is outlined in this chapter as well.
Not surprisingly, Arab women writers were scarce
until fairly recently, and what writings they did produce usually imitated the
norms established by the existing male-dominated literary tradition, but these
provided the foundations for the modern literary accomplishments of Arab women
and are the subject of Chapter Two. Included in this chapter is a discussion of
nonfiction genres such as poetry, although the primary focus of this study is
the novel. I found it necessary to include these because it was in these forms
that Arab women writers began to develop a distinct aesthetic. This happened as
these women began to feel a sense of solidarity with their predecessors (who
were even fewer) and developed a more political awareness of themselves as
women. Deriving strength from bonds with other women, they found ways to subvert
the system that denied them access to education and intellectual society, which
are vital to any writer. By forming their own literary societies and
establishing salons and journals, a number of privileged Arab women writers were
able to bring some mainstream cultural activities to their normally isolated
domains, and they could gain at least some exposure to the outside world and to
literary criticism and discussion. Ironically, Christian women were
disproportionately well-represented among the more successful women writers, as
so many of them were educated in Western missionary schools. This meant that, in
relation to their Muslim counterparts, they were more likely to have read a
great deal and to have learned values that reflected women's greater freedom in
the West. Overall, the work produced by the writers discussed in Chapter Two
remained rather meager; however, considering their education levels, their
limited mobility, and lack of attention and credit given them by literary
critics of the time, their work stands as a symbol of these writers' remarkable
talents and determination to overcome the barriers placed before them.
Chapter Three surveys the 1950s and 1960s, at which
time women's novels gained momentum and women writers emerged in greater
numbers. This was a fairly natural progression in that, as individual Arab
states won their independence and looked for ways to strengthen themselves
nationally, education became much more widely available to girls and women. In
the wave of individualism that tends to follow struggles for national
independence, Arab women writers approached their work from individualistic
perspectives and produced literature that greatly resembled that of earlier
Western feminists. They began writing about their own lives often in first-person
narration, a sign that they were breaking a ay from the established literary
traditions to which the previous generation had adhered so closely. Their
writing was characterized by protest against male domination and by an
insistence that en be held accountable for this situation. Key themes were
individualism, the drive to assert a personal and distinctly female identity,
and demands for the social, sexual, and political rights of women. (The subject
matter tended to center around a few main issues, as those in a position to
write were almost always from privileged backgrounds and were most concerned
with issues affecting them directly.) Of course, they did not escape the
internal conflict such themes bring about, and this was evident in their work.
They had to come to terms with their ambivalence toward their own bodies-symbols
of their individual existence, but also constructed as objects by their culture
and therefore simultaneously limiting to them as individuals. They experienced
conflict with regard to their mothers as well, because their mothers represented
both the writers themselves and the traditions they were trying to escape. They
also wrestled with the dilemma of how to live if there was no place in society
where nontraditional women were fully accepted. Most of them paid a high price
personally for pursuing writing careers. And still there remained the problem of
harsh critics who attacked not only women's writings, but the writers themselves
in ways they would have never done had the writer been men. Fortunately, general
acceptance of women writers improved as more women were published, evidenced by
the increased demand for, and discussion of, women's literature. Many publishers
even began to put these authors' photographs on the back covers of their books--a
phenomenon that, though perhaps problematic in some ways (since this was not the
practice for male authors and one wonders why it was established in the first
place), at least testifies to the publishers' confidence that making female
authorship obvious would not hurt the sale of the books.
Finally, Chapter Four discusses trends beginning in
the late 1960s, and especially after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when women's
literature underwent another shift in emphasis and attitudes. As a result of the
military disaster and a new interest in
the
Palestinian problem, women novelists began to place greater stress on
international politics. This shift caused women novelists some difficulties.
Historical details became so important in some novels that characterization
suffered, as did credibility when the writers attempted to describe experiences
about which they knew very little such as fighting in the war.
Nevertheless, they concentrated on the question of national identity and
effected changes in the way the public viewed and acted on the threat to the
Arab world. For example, some women writers subscribed to the philosophy that
national problems are the responsibility of every citizen and that true
citizenship requires one to actively assume that responsibility rather than wait
passively or escape the turmoil. In general, the struggle for women's freedom
and national identity were being linked in a way they had not been before--they
were no longer simply parallel, but were interdependent struggles. There were
some writers who placed such emphasis on the need for national solidarity that
it came to overshadow their former insistence on individual identity; in fact,
in the face of the national crisis and the need for solidarity, some of these
writers ceased to look upon men as the primary oppressors. Instead, they saw
both men and women as being oppressed by existing political and social
conditions and constantly threatened by hostile foreign forces.
However, the trend seems to be the integration, to greater or lesser
degrees, of feminist and nationalist concerns in Arab women's novels, and we can
only guess how this will affect the development of these novels. Will the number
of Arab women novelists increase as women are motivated and encouraged by
political conditions? How will these novels affect and reflect the movements for
national solidarity and women's rights? And how will these novelists change the
face of Arabic literature?