Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East since 1967

Foreword

ix Foreword Evelyne Accad Samira Aghacy is a serious and thorough scholar as well as a highly competent academic administrator, a blend one does not often find in our field, especially in the extremely difficult conditions of war that have plagued Lebanon in these last decades. Under harsh conditions, she was able not only to lead the Lebanese American University of Beirut (as chairperson of the Humanities Division and as dean of the School of Arts and Sciences since 2003) with innovative ideas and a profound sense of justice and commitment, but to produce research of extreme importance, such as this latest book on masculinities in the Arab world, as well as creative poetic collections, A Spike Unleashed (Al Kamel, 1994) and Silence Is Her Voice (forthcoming). She is also the author of many illuminating articles on novelists writing in Arabic, thus able to make them better known to the Western public who, without her, would remain unaware of their important contribution to world literature. She has been active in attending and presenting papers at major conferences in the field as well as editing several issues of Al-Raida, the journal published by the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab world. In addition to all these time-consuming tasks, Aghacy has managed to be an inspiring professor who has taught several of these topics to her students at the Lebanese American University. In this critical analysis of masculine identity in the Arab East, Samira Aghacy has used feminist theories in all of their complexities as well as an approach inspired by the new field of men’s studies. She was able to show that men, in the Arab world, are a product of their geohistorical political context, thus avoiding essentializing their role within Arab societies and more clearly showing that both men and women suffer under patriarchal domination and oppression. x | Foreword This is a timely and original work that will not go unnoticed. It finally deals with a question not often talked about in both Eastern and Western criticism, most particularly in Arab scholarship, namely the delicate topic of Arab masculinity ; it is therefore a much needed approach. The fact that Aghacy is fluent in both Arabic and English has allowed her to produce a work of criticism no one else could have tackled as successfully. She deals with a large number of Arabic novels, many of which have not yet been translated into other languages despite their importance. It is thus an invaluable tool for anyone working in modern Arabic literature, gender studies, postcolonial literature, sexuality and gender in literature, gender and violence in the Middle East, literature and politics, war literatures, and comparative studies and literature. The regions of the Middle East covered, namely Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, have been plagued by numerous wars and conflicts affecting the populations of these countries. While most gender studies have concentrated on women’s roles in these contexts, Aghacy tackles men’s issues and the disastrous effects of conflicts on them as well, thus demystifying the notion of their superiority and importance, showing their vulnerability and all the anxieties and problems raised by these conflicts and by the expectations placed on them. Some of the most interesting aspects of this work are how many of the novels deal with male hysteria and paranoia when the male characters are deprived of their authority; men tend to turn their frustrations and anger on women, especially their wives, the easy victims of these situations. Masculinity can also be analyzed as defense of war, resistance, men ready to die for their country while despising women for their passivity and exhibiting real misogynistic feelings; they bond with other male characters while seeming to function in heterosexual relationships. The character of the fida’i (the martyr or the one who gives his life so others may live) is one very much valued in many of these novels. For these men, women are seen as mothers symbolizing the land’s fecundity. Masculinity takes on multiple forms and holds many ambiguities. Masculinity can be fragile and vulnerable, while violent forms of masculinity generated by war can produce subordinate masculinities similar to feminine positions in the patriarchal landscape. It is clear that many men are also victims of war and that the concept of masculinity is a highly complex one. This is one among many of Aghacy’s compelling analysis and argument. It raises crucial issues for today’s world and literary criticism. [3.144...