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 MESA 2006 Panel Summaries
Women’s Discourses in Modern Arabic Writing
Submitted by Clarissa Burt
Panel Participants:
Chair: Adel S. Gamal, University of Arizona
Paper Presenters: Lital Levy, UC Berkeley; Anchi Hoh, Library of Congress; Maysa Abou-Youssef Hayward, Ocean College; Nouri Gana, Queen’s University and Clarissa Burt, U.S. Naval College
This panel, organized by the MESA secretariat around the theme of modern Arab women’s writing, was a wonderful serendipitous mix of papers that came together quite well, with several remarkable points of contact and relationship among the papers. Women’s writings in Arabic continue to inform us of marginal experiences and points of view in the spectrum of modern Arabic societies, challenging past values and histories, toying with taboos, social, political and literary.
Lital Levy of UC Berkeley initiated the panel with her paper, entitled “A Jewish Woman in the Nahda: Arabism, Feminism, and Judaism in the Writing of Esther Azhari Moyal.” This Palestinian Jewess, whose writings in Arabic indicate her passionate participation in the Arabic cultural and literary Nahda’s discussions of women’s rights, is an important example of those in the Palestinian Jewish community who identified with and participated passionately in Arabic literary society and culture. They viewed with dismay the political developments concerning Palestine, which led to social and sectarian polarization and ultimately to the establishment of Israel and dispossession of Palestinians. Levy’s fascinating paper detailed the life and writings of the remarkable Esther Azhari Moyal (1873-1948), allowing her to regain her place as one of the women participating in the discussions of the first wave of feminism in Arabic discourse at the end of the nineteenth century. The richness of her writings reveals a profound knowledge and love of both Arabic and European literary cultures, as Levy’s important paper shows, helping us to fill in an ever more complex understanding of modern Arabic and letters and society in the first half of the twentieth century.
Anchi Hoh of the Library of Congress presented her paper, “The Journey of Self-Empowerment in Contemporary Kuwaiti Women’s Short Stories.” In detailed examples from short stories by several Kuwaiti Women, including Layla Uthman in particular, Hoh argued for the literary development of Kuwaiti women’s short stories as testament to and example of the social, marital and psychological struggles of Kuwaiti women’s individuation and struggle toward liberation. She detailed the issues and marginal experiences articulated in these stories, troubling any pat dismissal of Kuwaiti women as denied a voice and participation in their own society, while also pointing out the limitations, frustration, and oppression, which the female characters face. She considered the literary merits of the texts and discussed the literary fate of several of the writers. Hoh plans to follow the development of Kuwaiti women’s fictional literary discourse in years to come.
Maysa Abou-Youssef Hayward of Ocean College presented her paper entitled, “The Sacred and the Secret: Egyptian Women Writing the Divine and the Profane.” Using selections from the works of Alifa Rifaat and Ahdaf Soueif and Maysa Abou-Youssef, Hayward established a framework of contrasts between the sacred and profane, honor and taboo spaces, traditional moral principles and moral infraction, and purity and the obscene. Specifically, she looked at instances of lesbian imagery taking place within feminine domestic space established by taboo barriers associated with protection from outside masculine incursion. These instances of lesbian imagery in the works cited unfold this taboo domestic space of the feminine as potentially troubling and morally problematic in relation to the moral dictates of the larger social realm.
Nouri Gana of Queen’s University offered his paper entitled “In Search of Andalusia: The Reinvention of Arabness in Recent Arab-American Fiction.” This work examined the use of the grand metaphor of the Arab loss of Andalusia in contemporary Arab-American post-9/11 literature, most particularly in Crescent, the award-winning novel by Diana Abu Jaber. Nouri Gana examined the images of displacement and nostalgia encoded into the novel set in the Arab-American community in Los Angeles, along with the literary ecstasy over Middle Eastern culinary practices in the immigrant community. Both these themes contribute to the construction of Arab-identification in the work, as part and parcel of the hybridity which the novel presents.
Finally, Clarissa Burt of the U.S. Naval Academy presented her paper entitled “We Crazies: Hoda Hussein’s Poetics and Text Production in Contemporary Egypt.” She described Hussein’s place in Egyptian literary society as poet, novelist and translator from contemporary French literature and focused on the poet’s most recent collection of poetry entitled “Nahnu l-Majanin/We Crazies.” Burt presented her literary impressions of a number of the poems in the collection. Some were contemplations of the morality of positions concerning the war in Iraq; some concerned domestic violence, political economy, and most remarkably, the only instance Burt has encountered to date of contemporary Arabic treatments of lesbian imagery in the intimacy of poetic expression, without the formal distance afforded by prose fiction.
In all, this panel was very entertaining and informative, showing a broad spectrum of historical and contemporary modern Arabic literature by women, with particular perspectives and remarkable Arabic literary expressions of women’s experience and thought.
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