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Reviewed by:
  • Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices against Violence by Brinda Mehta
  • Brinda Mehta (bio)
Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices against Violence Brinda Mehta London: Routledge, 2014 292 pages. ISBN 9780415730440

Editors' Note: Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices against Violence won the African Literature Association's 2016 Book of the Year Award for "its originality, meticulous research, detailed analysis, nuances, anti-essentialist negotiations of identity, thought-provoking feminist stand, and groundbreaking examination of the diverse forms of Arab women's creative dissidence. The committee was unanimous in its decision to award the prize to Professor Mehta" (Soraya Mekerta, Spelman College, past president [2013–14] of the African Literature Association).

This is a response to Abdelkader Cheref's review of my book Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices against Violence in this journal (13:3 [November 2017]: 438–41).

Cheref was gratuitously patronizing, sloppy, and dismissive, as well as misinformed, in his review. I respond to only some of his egregious mistakes. Accusing me of essentialism for identifying the women writers whose works I analyze as Arab, Cheref offers genetic and racialized essentialisms as an alternative—for example, "Maghrebis are Imazighen (Berbers) and not Arab" and "Egyptians are not genetically Arab" (438). Cheref seems unaware of postcolonial and antiracialist contestations of genetic and other forms of identity essentialism. Beyond the problematic intellectual and theoretical lack these comments indicate, the women I interviewed and whose personal essays, memoirs, and blogs I examined self-identify as Arab or mixed-race Arab-Imazighen. Writers as diverse as Maïssa Bey, Faïza Guène, Laila Lalami, Lamiae El Amrani, and Assia Djebar, among others, have claimed their inbetweenness as transnational "Arab Mezzaterrans" (Soueif 2004, 7) in their language, creative expression, geography, social location, religion, and political activism. Cheref cites a 1970s study when he accuses me of being "unaware of the current debates in the Maghreb." [End Page 233] He objects to my use of North Africa over Maghreb, citing the former's neocolonial, "racially tinged" overtones despite using it in the title of his book (Cheref 2010). Cheref wrongly claims that my book misrepresents "Bey's use of the enfumades example" when I write about the child narrator who "witnesses the extermination of an entire tribe through the infamous military strategy of enfumades … burning alive" (38). He complains that the book provides the wrong time line for the Algerian War of Independence when I was referring to the Algerian civil war of the early 1990s. He claims that I rely "entirely on a 1996 Amnesty International report" to discuss this war (439), yet my sources included Zahia Salhi, Réda Bensmaïa, Maïssa Bey, Benjamin Stora, and others. His accusation that "chronology is not respected" with reference to Miseria is simply bewildering, since the book was published in 1997 and Morocco's Years of Lead lasted from 1956 to 1999. Cheref is startled "to read that Guène is a French youth of color." Why does he consider this "neologism" controversial among "French young men and women of Maghrebi descent"? Why would I read an arbitrary list of writers on his shelf whose work has little to do with the subject of my book? Most important, he does not engage once with the literary analysis I offer.

Brinda Mehta

BRINDA MEHTA is professor of French and Francophone studies and of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Mills College. Contact: mehta@mills.edu.

References

Cheref, Abdelkader.
2010. Gender and Identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and Feminism in Maghrebi Women's Literature. New York: Tauris.
Soueif, Ahdaf.
2004. Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground. New York: Anchor.
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