Sheikhs and Shahrazad: Transnational Feminist Methods for Reading Diasporic and Popular Literatures of the Middle East

Hanadi Al-Samman’s Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writing (2015) and Amira Jarmakani’s An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror (2015) share an analytic investment in gender as an axis of subject formation in transnational literatures. Al-Samman studies the work of Arab women writers in the diaspora to understand how women navigate authorship in patriarchal contexts and how the writers’ social position as diasporic women informs their literary production. For Jarmakani, the American desert romance novel, marked by the use of the desert and the sheikh as tropes, models imperial constructions of gender and sexuality that not only produce heteronormative subjects but echo and justify the logic of the United States’ war on terror. An Imperialist Love Story looks to the representation of race, gender, and sexuality in desert romances as sites for the production of subjects aligned with the war on terror.

Al-Samman’s Anxiety of Erasure traces two common references in Arab women’s diasporic literature: Shahrazad, the storyteller of The Thousand and One Nights and the mawʾudah, the buried female infant. Through an exploration of six authors (Ghada Samman, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamida Naʾnaʾ, Hoda Barakat, Salwa al-Neimim, and Samar Yazbek) and over a dozen novels, she suggests Arab women writers have developed a poetics of presence that maintains mobility in the face of the traumas of displacement and literary erasure. She uses trauma theory in her reading practice and analyzes how writers move beyond oral traditions to articulate transnational, revolutionary subjectivities that challenge patriarchal constructions of Arab nationalism, particularly in Syria and Lebanon.

The first and second chapters develop Al-Sammam’s theoretical and methodological frameworks for selecting the texts and elaborate the keywords diaspora and trauma. Al-Samman positions the diaspora and the many ways one might become diasporic as sites of trauma minority authors must rewrite to recover (23–24). Here recovery denotes both the figurative act of connecting to a lost homeland and the literal act of healing from traumatic wounds. Al-Samman contends that Arab women authors’ “rhizomatic belongings … are manifested in the constant shuffling between their diasporic sites and their homelands as well as in the insistence of the majority of them on using the Arabic language as their medium of literary expression” (37). Writing in Arabic thus serves as one way that Al-Samman selects her subjects as well as one strategy that her writers employ.

For Al-Samman, the presence of Shahrazad and the mawʾudah in Arab women’s writing evidences the writers’ anxieties about being erased from Arab literature. Arab women writers use those tropes to reflect on their dual erasure and to write their presence back into the literature and the nation. Chapter 2 details the origins of the mawʾudah trope and establishes it as a metaphor for Arab women’s literary and political suffocation as subjects of often sexist nationalist projects and as subjects of the diaspora. Al-Samman links Arab women’s experiences to trauma and cites their repetition of the tropes as the means by which those writers transform “individual traumatic experiences of burial … honor killing … sexual abuse … and bodily harm [into] collective projects of resurrection and survival not just for the characters involved, but rather for their readers and the whole Arab nation”(59). In this way, Al-Samman sites trauma as a part of a collective history or memory. Al-Samman’s remaining chapters deal with specific diasporic Arab women authors and their texts. Some chapters are comparative within an author’s archive and some are comparative across authors.

Jarmakani’s Imperialist Love Story is a rich exploration of the fantasies and desires that simultaneously undergird romance novels and...