 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 August 2000 Issue No. 496 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 August 2000 Issue No. 496
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Mission impossible
By Youssef Rakha
Female presence in the culture and the arts of the Arab world is like a layer of muslin among the heaped up piles of solid matter. Though increasingly pervasive, it is too thin and often of dubious quality. This makes it hard to separate or process, and even harder to evaluate. For in the Arab world the age-old questions at stake -- equal opportunities, freedom of expression, intellectual departures from the patriarchal norm -- are but a negligible portion of what is actually involved in practicing, commenting on, promoting and criticising gender-oriented and women's literature.
Too often the philosophical, political and social objectives that supposedly underline women's literary endeavours are discordant with the points being made, particularly in outstanding works; the anti-patriarchal world view, in the works of, say, Nawal El-Sa'dawi, is reduced to a female-male version of the struggle between good and evil; the double standards of (male dominated) society are played up, but only to reveal a different set of prejudices, sometimes amounting to a latent acceptance of patriarchy or taking the form of (utopian) preaching.
Two diametrically opposed but equally "major" events -- both the subject of much journalistic commentary during the unwinding week -- exemplify recurrent responses to the dilemma of how to sustain and thicken that layer of muslin without excessively antagonising all that surrounds it, of effecting progressive change without inducing a reactionary response. In stark contrast to each other, the two events also reveal a typical difference between older (classicist) and younger (subversive) women writers -- the "pioneers" and the "modernists" as they are called.
On the one hand, the widely revered veteran Palestinian poet Fadwa Touqan's presence in the Jordanian Jarash Festival (in a literary criticism seminar, opened by head of the festival Akram Masarwa, whose focus was her contribution) solicited not only the predictable wide-ranging celebration of a cultural icon but a renewed interest in the history of Arab women's struggles to write, make themselves heard and known. Her frail figure barely visible to an astoundingly large audience, Touqan told her story before reading a new and unpublished poem -- her eyesight eventually failing her and forcing her to stop, handing the poem to poet Grais Samawi, the deputy head of the festival, so that the reading could be resumed: "And love becomes the world/ And love becomes the vision/ And love becomes the path," Samawi continued.
When she emerged in the 1940s, Touqan explained, the mere idea of a literary woman was incongruous and even unacceptable. Arab poetic conventions through history, with the exception of the Andalus, likewise allowed women to practice only one of the aghrad (purposes and, by extension, genres based on general topics), that of elegy and lamentation. A staunch classicist, Touqan nonetheless asserted that it was freedom that brought about the creative spark, the joy of poetry, suggesting that the struggle of the Arab woman writer has been an attempt to widen and vary the scope of the Arab woman's freedom by igniting that joyful spark through poetry, public life -- and beyond.
Ilham Mansour, a previously little known writer, on the other hand, has managed to attract attention using the shock tactics of post-modern subversion -- or, at least, proposing to do so -- which tactics are sadly not shocking enough. Mansour's claim that lesbianism in the Arab world is a taboo subject, unspoken about and unspeakable, is valid to some extent, but the process of writing about it simply to fill that gap turns out to be disappointing. Wouldn't a historical or social survey -- i.e., a non-fiction book -- have done that more effectively? The restless, hypothetical protagonists of her newly published (and by now scandalous) novel, Ana, Hiya, Ant (I, She, You) reflect neither historical-social realities nor even personal feelings, but instead operate in a contrived intellectual space in which the subject remains spurious.
And in this Mansour follows in the footsteps of a whole battalion of angry young people positioned across the Arab world whose object, one surmises, is to arouse attention rather than deal with the issues at stake. At one end of the spectrum, then -- the sedate classicist, resuming a notable contribution and merely talking about freedom; at the other -- the volatile "modernist" shocking an unsuspecting audience with explicit avowals of (unprecedented?) opinions, thus forgoing the joyful spark of what freedom she has carved out for her art. And in between -- the struggle, the cause, the infinite ground that has yet to be covered before gender and self expression are no longer issues in Arab society and culture.
