Egyptian Women’s Writings

Less than forty years ago Arab women creative writers were virtually unknown at home and abroad. The two celebrated exceptions, the Syrian Colette Khoury and the Lebanese Layla Baalbaki, who had published some stories in the late 1950s, highlighted this absence. Then, in the mid-1970s, the situation began to change. In 1975 the Egyptian physician-activist-novelist Nawal El Saadawi, who had been publishing nonfiction since the late 1950s, brought out her Imraʾa ʿinda nuqtat alsifr. This novella about a psychiatrist’s meeting with a woman prisoner the night before her execution for killing her pimp was quickly recognized as a classic. It was translated into English as Woman at Point Zero in 1983 and became essential reading in courses on Arabic literature. In 1986 the first international women’s book fair in London launched two new names: the Lebanese Hanan al-Shaykh and the Egyptian Alifa Rifaat. Critics and educators in the Arab world and elsewhere began to pay attention to Arab women writers and their demands for gender justice. Publishers sought them out. By 2017 it has become commonplace to see women’s names alongside those of men on the lists of all major literary prizes for Arabic literature. Among Arab countries, Egypt has witnessed the largest production of feminist writings. Virtually unnoticed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because they were writing for each other and publishing in women’s journals, Egyptian women today are writing in the mainstream.

This volume features three articles about Egyptian women writers, Nawal El Saadawi, Miral al-Tahawy, and the 1990s generation to whom the latter belongs. Zimu Niu, Caroline Seymour-Jorn, and Valerie Anishchenkova focus on novels that investigate the role of gender assignation in late twentieth-century Egyptian society. From village life somewhere on the Nile to Cairo to tribal communities in the Egyptian desert, these literary works interrogate assumptions about the ways in which men and women are seen and are expected to behave.

Within the context of El Saadawi’s vast oeuvre, Niu looks at one of her least-known novels, The Circling Song (1973). Using the Taoist lens of yin and yang, in which masculine and feminine are coherent, complementary, and not hierarchical, Niu demonstrates that for El Saadawi “cultural and political factors are stronger than the anatomical in shaping and altering people’s identities, which should be seen as variables instead of constants in the formulas for one’s destiny in a given society.” Seymour-Jorn also concentrates on a single novel, al-Tahawy’s Tent (1996). She provides an anthropologically informed close reading of this remarkable narrative of a girl struggling to thrive in a deeply patriarchal tribal community transitioning to modernity. Seymour-Jorn argues, in some cases against other critics, that this novel, weaving as it does between fiction, tribal poetry, and autobiography, presents “the physical, cultural, and spiritual texture of everyday life in a Bedouin household.” Anishchenkova also reads al-Tahawy, in this case Blue Aubergine (1998). She claims that this hybrid, polyphonic, and intertextual novel represents the “New Age literary feminism in Egypt” of a group of disenchanted, rebellious, escapist, yet socially activist women and men writers identified as Jil al-tisʿinaat (the 1990s Generation). Women like May al-Tilmisani, Amina Zaydan, Sahar al-Muji, Siham Badawy, Sumayyah Ramadan, Bahijah Husayn, Muna Prince, and Nura Amin, Anishchenkova states, are “the first literary generation of ‘gender equality.’ They boldly experiment with the language, including miscellaneous registers and patois of colloquial Egyptian, in the effort to translate the colorful polyphony of contemporary Egypt onto text.”

Each of these essays dealing with what some might call feminist texts refuses labels. They do so not to reduce the complexity of the narratives to ideology but to open up the possibility of exploring the development of identities outside society’s imposed gender norms.