Arab Women Writers: An Anthology Of Short Stories
Dalya Cohen Mor (ed., tr.)
Mor, Dalya Cohen (ed., tr.);
Arab Women Writers: An Anthology Of Short Stories (Women Writers in Translation)
State University of New York Press, 2005, 305 pages
ISBN 0791464199 9780791464199
topics: | arabic | egypt | saudi | lebanon | fiction-short | gender
These stories speak to you across the vast chasms of space and time.
The three stories excerpted below all relate women's voices - the first of a girl coming into puberty, the second of a woman facing a marital conflict, and the third of a married woman seeking adventure.
Excerpts
These three stories, all titled "The picture" reveal different aspects of a woman's point of view.
The Picture : Nawal al-Saadawi (b. 1931, Egypt)
[The 13-year old Narjis notices the changes coming over her body, when she accidentally observes the servant girls' buttocks.
She reveres her father, even his photo, which she gazes at fondly]
Every time she looked at her father [the photo], she felt that she was not seeing enough of him, that she wanted to see more of him.
For thirteen years, since the day she was born, she had seen him only from the back. When he had his back to her, she could raise her eyes and contemplate his tall, broad frame. She never looked him in the eye, and never exchanged a glance or a word with him. When he looked at her, she bowed her head; and when he spoke to her, it was not words he uttered, but instructions and orders, to which she responded with “Okay” or “Yes” mechanically, in blind obedience. p.61
She carried her head proudly as she walked beside him on the street. She could almost see that all eyes were fixed on her father, and that all lips were parted in good wishes for him.
As she lay on her back, her protruding buttocks rubbed against the bed, and a new, pleasant shudder ran through her body. She stretched out her trembling fingers to feel her backside. Two rounded mounds of flesh were crammed between her and the bed. She turned over onto her face to avoid feeling them and to try to sleep, but they rose up into the air, their weight pressing down on her stomach. She turned over onto her side, but they continued to rub against the bed every time she breathed in or out.
[but then, she finds her father having sex with the maid on the kitchen floor (they are rolling on the floor, perhaps struggling - is it a rape?), and her revered picture gets destroyed]
Katherine Roth on Nawal el-Saadawi
excerpts from Cairo Today, July 1991 http://thebestofhabibi.com/4-vol-12-no-4-fall-1993/nawal-el-saadawi/ Nawal el-Saadawi is perhaps the best loved, most hated and best known feminist in the Arab world. Her determination to achieve sexual equality for Arab women, her uncompromisingly aggressive manner, and her demands for liberties such as sex before marriage have drawn the attention of Arabs and Westerners alike. “I’ve been attacked for over 40 years. Either I can look back and attack back or look forward and write more books. When they say I’m crazy, I see it as a compliment. I think they (critics) are crazy. They are miserable. They marry and cannot divorce. I have divorced twice. I want to change the system and I start with myself. Women are buried in the name of good manners, and I try to pull them out of that grave,” she says, and goes on, refusing to be interrupted. “I’m ready to die if someone tries to stop me from expressing myself.” Her conviction that sexual equality is in line with Islam and that a fair division of labor works in practice, as well as in theory, are proven in the most essential unit of society she hopes to change, her family. Far from being the lone Amazonian warrior she sometimes seems, Nawal is the matriarch of a new kind of Egyptian family — a Muslim, feminist family. El-Saadawi has been married for 27 years to Sherif Hetata, medical doctor and novelist. They have two children, Mona, el-Saadawi’s daughter by a previous marriage, and Atef. “We’re still considered an odd family, but we’ve imposed ourselves by working. People can’t say we’re an unproductive family,” says Hetata, a progressive thinker who was jailed for 13 years under King Farouk and Nasser because of his views.
Nawal el-Saadawi as a young woman
Life
Born to a family of little means in the Delta village of Kafr Tahla in 1931, el-Saadawi says she became a feminist at age seven. “It started unconsciously when I was a child. I felt the discrimination,” she wrote in Opening the Gates (Indiana University Press, 1991). “My parents and my family were relatively quite liberal. But I felt that my brother was privileged. And then when I grew up I became a physician, and I worked in rural areas, and so on, where I started to become aware of the fact that what I had felt years earlier was the truth.”
In 1955, el-Saadawi became Egypt’s director of public health. She began writing novels and short stories over 30 years ago and in 1972 published her first study on Arab women, Women and Sex. This cost the author her position in the Ministry of Health, her post as chief editor of the medical journal Health and her job as assistant secretary general of Egypt’s Medical Association.
She reacted by focusing her energies on the plight of Arab women. From 1973 to 1976, she researched neurosis and women at Ain Shams University and from 1979 to 1980 she served as the UN advisor for the Women’s Program in Africa and the Middle East.
Soon after her return to Egypt, her outspoken views led to a three-month prison term. Her imprisonment did not discourage her fight for increased democracy and justice in the region, and the very day she was released, consistent with the direct style for which she is known, she demanded greater democracy in Egypt under President Mubarak. El-Saadawi demands democracy right down to the division of labor within her own family. She contends that this egalitarian family structure is in line with Islam, and that veiling and the unequal treatment of women under the law are the result of misinterpretation of the Quran. But she is the first to admit that the attainment of her ideal marriage has not been easy. “I divorced two husbands before I met Sherif, so you see it is not really easy for an independent, free woman to have a successful marriage,” she says. “It is almost impossible. “They wanted to dominate me and my life, like most husbands do, but I wouldn’t have it,” she says. “My relationship with Sherif is based on equality and justice. For almost 20 years we shared all the housework and the responsibilities of raising children. It was only four years ago that we started having a houseman — not a housemaid, incidentally.”
Views on sex
Sex, according to those most established in progressive circles, is el-Saadawi’s real problem and is what separates her from other Arab feminists and would-be supporters. Ameena el-Said, the first professional woman journalist in Egypt, and an outspoken feminist in her time, was not imprisoned for her activism and fight for equality of the sexes. On the contrary, she was awarded the highest honors by Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak for her activism. Yet she and el-Saadawi were fighting for much the same thing. Aside from their differing approaches to the problem of sexual inequality, the main difference is that el-Said never went as far as to support pre-marital sex. For the government and for many Arabs, that was taking things a bit too far. “El-Saadawi has the right idea. But she is going too fast for Egypt,” says el-Said. “She wants a sexual revolution before most women are even literate. That’s no good. Women must be strong and free. But they must respect their bodies. I would never support free sex.”
The Picture : Layla al-Uthman (b. 1945, Kuwait)
[A woman, at age 45, decides she needs an adventure] some women had prominent bosoms with cleavage like a warm riverbed, exuding splendid fragrances.... The men sidled up and sniffed, lust and hunger in their glances. [after her birthday party (45th), thrown by her husband] I stood in front of the big mirror with the golden frame. It gleamed. My face and half my body were reflected in it. I drew closer and closer, until my face filled the mirror. I looked at my face closely. It was only then that I decided to be unfaithful to my husband. I made a resolution: to be unfaithful to my husband. How? When? With whom? I wasn’t concerned with finding answers to these serious questions. I was at a moment of resolution. I resolved to embark on an adventure—I felt I needed it. [But then she meets an woman at the grocery shop, whose face seems extremely familiar. Later, she recalls that this was the woman whose photograph his son had sent her - after being seduced into spending a night with her.]
The Picture : Latifa al-Zayyat (1923–1996, Egypt)
[Amal is on vacation with her husband, and faces the possibility that he may be attracted to a woman "in her thirties, wearing shorts that exposed her full, white thighs". al-Zayyat hints at problems in the marriage, through flashbacks to the days when they fell in love - one presumes (based on the society so vividly described in The open door, that love marriages were still quite taboo. Even as she feels the relationship withering, she clutches on to him. After her husband notices the other woman in the casino: ] The fire was burning in Izzat’s eyes again. Those eyes, which for a long time seemed sightless, gliding over things without noticing them, had begun to see. They were once again lit with that fire, both fascinating and bewildering, the fire that burned and begged. Had she forgotten that gaze of his? Was it the summer resort? Was it the vacation? The only thing that mattered was that it had returned to envelop her again in a fever of excitement. Amal noticed Izzat’s dark brown hand, with its protruding veins, and she was racked with a desire to lean over and kiss it. Her eyes filled with tears. She drew [their son] Midhat close to her with fumbling hands and planted kisses on him from cheek to ear. She hugged him, and when the fire that had invaded her body had subsided, she let him go and began searching for the rainbow through her tears, tilting her head to one side.
bio: Latifa al-Zayyat
(based on bio from Salma Jayyusi, Modern Arabic Fiction, 2008) Born in Egypt, Latifa al-Zayyat obtained a Ph.D. in literature at the Egyptian University and has taught English literature at the Women’s College of ‘Ain Shams University. One of Egypt’s most highly respected women in the public sphere, she was, before her death, head of the Department for the Defense of National Culture, and her seventieth birthday was the subject of a major celebration. Her work is particularly interesting for its treatment of subjects rarely touched on hitherto by women in modern Arab culture. Her literary work ranges from criticism, The Image of Women in Some Arabic Novels and Short Stories (1986) and Naguib Mahfouz: The Image and the Ideal (1986), to creative work in the various genres. Her first novel, The open door), published in 1960, brought her wide acclaim, though she received her major awards (the State prize for Literature, and the inaugural Naguib Mahfouz award) only in the year of her death. She has also published an autobiographical account of her life and experiences, A Search Raid: Personal Files (1992), which may be regarded, for its candor, sincerity of approach, and fluent style, as one of the most attractive personal accounts available in Arabic.
Contents
Introduction 1 Arab Women Writers: A Brief Sketch 3 Thematic Aspects 7 Modes of Writing 18 Arab Women: Old Images, New Profiles 23
Part One Growing Up Female
That Summer Holiday : Samiya At'ut (Palestine) 30 The Parting Gift : Umayma al-Khamis (b. 1966, Saudi Arabia) 32 Let’s Play Doctor : Nura Amin (Egypt) 38 In the Moonlight : Radwa Ashour (Egypt) 41 At the Beach : Buthayna al-Nasiri (Iraq) 44 A Helping Hand : Mona Ragab (Egypt) 48 In the Recesses of Memory : Fawziya Rashid (Bahrain) 49 Fragments from a Life : Sharifa al-Shamlan (Saudi Arabia) 52 The Slave : Najiya Thamir (Syria) 55
Part Two Love and Sexuality
The Picture : Nawal al-Saadawi (Egypt) 60 The Picture : Latifa al-Zayyat 65 The Picture : Layla al-Uthman (Kuwait) 73 The Smile : Nafila Dhahab (Tunisia) 79 My Mother’s : Friend Nura Amin (Egypt) 81 A Worthless Woman : Hayat Bin al-Shaykh (Tunisia) 83
Part Three Male-Female Relations
Where To? : Colette Suhayl al-Khuri (Syria) 88 The Cat : Layla Ba'labakki (Lebanon) 92 The Woman of My Dreams : Fadila al-Faruq (Algeria) 97 Mozart’s Fez : Samiya At'ut (Palestine) 100 A Virgin Continent : Samira Azzam (Palestine) 101 An Old Couple : Nadiya Khust (Syria) 106
Part Four Marriage
A Mistake in the Knitting : Ihsan Kamal (Egypt) 112 My Wedding Night : Alifa Rifaat (Egypt) 120 The Dummy : Sahar al-Muji (Egypt) 127 The Cat, the Maid, and the Wife : Daisy al-Amir (Iraq) 129 Sun, I Am the Moon : Hanan al-Shaykh (Lebanon) 133 The Dreadful Sea : Zuhur Wanisi (Algeria) 141 Woman with a Story : Mayy Ziyada (Palestine) 147 The Persian Rug : Hanan al-Shaykh (Lebanon) 154 The Dream Aliya : Mamdouh (Iraq) 159 Pharaoh Is Drowning Again : Sakina Fuad (Egypt) 163
Part Five Childbearing
The Spider’s Web : Ihsan Kamal (Egypt) 172 Man and Woman : Rafiqat al-Tabi'a (Morocco) 178 Half a Woman : Sufi Abdallah (Egypt) 181 Heir Apparent : Ramziya Abbas al-Iryani (Yemen) 186 The Newcomer : Daisy al-Amir (Iraq) 189
Part Six Self-Fulfillment
International Women’s Day : Salwa Bakr (Egypt) 194 The Filly Became a Mouse : Layla Ba'labakki (Lebanon) 199 Restoration : Umayma al-Khamis (Saudi Arabia) 205 Waiting for Hayla : Umayma al-Khamis (Saudi Arabia) 206 The Closely Guarded Secret : Sahar al-Muji (Egypt) 209 I Will Never Forfeit My Right : Mona Ragab (Egypt) 210 Homecoming : Fadila al-Faruq (Algeria) 214 Bittersweet Memories : Zabya Khamis (United Arab Emirates) 217
Part Seven Customs and Values
Tears for Sale : Samira Azzam (Palestine) 222 Misfortune in the Alley : Ramziya Abbas al-Iryani (Yemen) 227 Questioning : Fawziya Rashid (Bahrain) 232 The Dinosaur : Emily Nasrallah (Lebanon) 235 Moonstruck : Hadiya Sa'id (Lebanon) 241 A Moment of Truth : Khayriya al-Saqqaf (Saudi Arabia) 245 The Future : Daisy al-Amir (Iraq) 248 The Gallows : Suhayr al-Tall ( Jordan) 254
Part Eight The Winds of Change
The Breeze of Youth : Ulfat al-Idilbi (Syria) 258 A Successful Woman : Suhayr al-Qalamawi (Egypt) 265 In Need of Reassurance : Radwa Ashour (Egypt) 270 Short and Sassy : Nafila Dhahab (Tunisia) 275 The Collapse of Barriers : Samiya At'ut (Palestine) 277 The Beginning : Salwa Bakr (Egypt) 280 A Moment of Contemplation : Nuzha Bin Sulayman (Morocco) 285 I Will Try Tomorrow : Mona Ragab (Egypt) 288 About the Authors 297
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