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s& MEMOIR tso NO SUCH THING AS WOMEN'S LITERATURE MIRIAM COOKE In the faU of 1995, 1 went to Syria to study women's writings. I had little idea what I might find. Even specialists ofArabic literature did not know much about the cultural scene inside HafizAsad's Syria ofthe 1990s. Many assumed that such a regime is so repressive that writers of conscience are either in jail, like Nizar Nayyuf, or in exile, like Zakaria Tamer. In 1992, the critic Jean Fontaine reduced the whole of Syrian literature to nightmare, "overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal. How could it be otherwise in a climate devoid of freedom of expression, where there are no intermediaries between the people and the state?" (Fontaine 1992:110). Were there women writing inside Syria? If there were, what were their preoccupations? Two good friends of mine are Syrian women writers who left Damascus in the 1960s to settle in Beirut. Ghada Samman (b.1942) is one of the Arab world's best known fiction writers, and Huda Naamani (b.1930) is a highly admired Sufi poet. I had met them just after graduate school, in the summer of 1980, when I was in Beirut doing preliminary research for a book on Lebanese civil war literature. My first meeting with Ghada Samman is quite a story! I got her telephone number from a friend and called her at home. The author of over twenty books, including novels and mostly absurdist short stories and some poetry, I had heard that she could be quite unpredictable. To my surprise and relief, she was very friendly on the phone and agreed to meet me. "How about tonight? Let's have dinner at Pasha's!" Tonight? But there's a curfew! Pooh poohing my nervousness, she said JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN'S STUDIES VoL 1, Na 2 (Spring 2005). C 2005 26 es JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN'S STUDIES she'd pick me up from my Clemenceau apartment at 6. At the appointed time I waited for the doorbell to ring. 6:15. 6:30. Still no Ghada. I paced back and forth from the balcony into the apartment and then out again, thinking all the while that it had been too good to be true. The famous Ghada Samman would not so easily meet with a nobody like me. FinaUy, I took a good look at a car parked about a hundred meters down the road. Two men in caps standing next to it had not moved for the half hour that I had been going in and out of the apartment. I waved tentatively when I noticed one of them looking up at the balcony on which I was standing. He acknowledged my greeting and I rushed out, filled with apologies for having kept them waiting and wondering what had happened to Ghada. When I got to the car, the younger of the two men turned to me and taking off the cap let loose a mane of shining black hair. The comedy had started well! Our dinner in the empty restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean with food piled high and untouched and our impressive intake of arak remains vivid in my mind until today. We talked of a thousand and one things, of everything except her work. "What do owls signify in your work?" She had chosen an owl for the logo of her publishing house that Bashir Daouk, her husband and owner of the famous publishing house Al-Talia, had just established. Owls figured in several of her stories. "Owls? Nothing. Why do you ask?" "Were the nightmares in Beirut Nightmares (1980) ones you had when you were caught in the crossfire?" Her villa had been in the area that opposing militias had occupied during the famous Battle of the Hotels in November 1976. In hundreds of vignettes that she calls Nightmares, she evokes the terror and absurdity of a few days spent cowering in corners and fantasizing wildly. "What do you mean? The novel's not about me. You know, you're never going to write about me. But I will write about you." Well, I did, and she didn't. That was...

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