Where Do We Go From Here?: Reading “Arab Women’s Writing” Today

[Response ]

No one today is purely one thing.

(Edward Saïd, Culture and Imperialism)

Who is the “Arab woman writer”? Both Nawar el-Hassan Golley’s edited collection and Brinda Mehta’s book confront us with this label. Indeed, the category of Arab women’s writing often functions as a stock subset of both postcolonial writing and women’s studies. The classification “Arab” may expand into “North African and Middle Eastern,” the “women’s studies” into “gender studies.” These represent slightly more pertinent, but still extremely general categories. In the aftermath of pan-Arabism, the rise of Islamism, and the increasing examples of sectarian conflicts throughout the region, the usefulness of the term “Arab” must itself be interrogated. As the example of Morocco perhaps illustrates best, women who under current theoretical paradigms fall under the “Arab” or “Middle Eastern” umbrella may, in fact, define themselves as neither, choosing simply “Moroccan” or “Amazighii” instead. However, as is usually the case, cultural categories remain maddeningly hard to shift. Indeed, at its worst the category “Arab women’s writing” serves to sell the odalisque back to the (ex)colonizer, giving us the opportunity to once again turn a sexualized yet politically correct gaze on the orientalized Other. In this way, the socio-political and economic consequences of decolonization have created a curious reversal: the “Oriental woman” has too-often become the “Arab woman (writer),” who now sells her story of brutal opression, followed by liberation and the realization of Western values, to the ex-colonizer.

In this light, the entire category of “Arab women’s writing” can be seen as a kind of literary prostitution in which the teller performs the empowerment of the Western reader. Ayan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel provides a recent, popular example of this new genre, whilst highbrow literary texts such as Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Tresspass or Assia Djedbar’s L’amour, la fantasia take a second path, attempting to correct Western misperceptions of their oppression by offering a more complex narrative framwork. Both narrative types enjoy a new popularity in the wake of post-September 11 politics. Also building on the interest in the grouping of texts we call “Arab women’s writing” are critical works such as those by al-Hassan Golley and Mehta. Academic work on Arab women’s writing as it appears most often today tends to overlap a great deal with the discourse of postcolonial studies, both in its choice of primary texts and the tendency to rely always on the same three theorists (Saïd, Homi Bhaba, Spivak). We also find a marked tendency to focus on autobiographical writing, or at least to point out the way in which a given fictional text exemplifies lived reality. In all fairness, as Lydie Moudelino has pointed out, this is in part due to the production of a large quantity of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical material as a necessary first step as those whose voices have been silent begin to write (Moudelino 2006, 13).

With its choice of subject matter, Arab Women’s Lives Retold follows in the steps of its predecessors, such as Cooke and Badran’s Opening the Gates (2004) or Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s Women’s Body, Women’s Word (1991), or even al-Hassan Golley’s previous book Reading Arab Women’s Biographies (2003). In her introduction to the new collection, Golley lays out four main theoretical areas the anthology will address: “cultural hybridity,” “transnationalism,” “communal identity,” and “the personal and the political” (xxviii). All four areas are hotly contested in this critical moment for postcolonial studies, where many are trying to write a way out of more traditional theoretical paradigms. Hybridity and créolité, for example, provide a way to structure our thinking about relationships between colonizer/colonized...