31 May - 6 June 2001
Issue No.536
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 31 May - 6 June 2001 Issue No.536 |
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Plain talk
One question that seems to repeatedly pop up concerns the existence of a feminine literature or, more precisely, whether such a literature can be distinguished from its male counterpart. Is there such a thing as a male sentence and a female sentence? The question has been most recently asked by John Walsh, a member of the controversial male jury that will award the Orange Prize for women's fiction.
Since its inception, Walsh writes, the literary world has been suspicious of the prize as offering a patronising "positive discrimination" to women writers. The female organisers of the prize, that is worth 30,000 pounds sterling, insist, for their part, that its point is to draw attention to women's writing that might otherwise be ignored. In the past the prize has been judged by an all women jury, something that has tended to suggest that only women can appreciate and pass judgment over women's fiction.
Walsh believes that it is pure folly "to assume that men can't read women's fiction as they would read novels by their own sex."
It is the first time that a male jury has been asked to read the 18 books on the Orange long-list. Would the male jury be able to identify, to isolate, a sensibility, a prose-style that was recognisably female?
Going through the 18 novels was quite revealing. A number of hitherto unknown women, Walsh says, have produced a body of distinctive work. At the same time there were a few "startlingly unreadable stiffs which had got on the long list. There were works by distinguished authors without energy or point. Authors with academic jobs in creative writing who couldn't convincingly describe a wheel barrow, authors scratching a personal itch without working it into properly motorised fiction."
But there are certain characteristics which distinguish these 18 novels. There were, Walsh says, many recurring obsessions. "Mothers and daughters, and the teasing out of a relationship both fraught and supportive, hostile and loving, was a major theme."
Domestic animals featured heavily, horticultural themes and images, floral backgrounds, secret gardens. Other themes included old-fashioned female pursuits and accomplishments from tapestry to knitting, calligraphy to cheese-making. But the central concern of modern female writers is "to loop back into the past -- the family records, the ancestral home, the original land, the settlers' roots -- and bring to life the community that subsisted there." It seems that respect of the past is at the heart of the modern female imaginative agenda.
The six books which the all male jury selected "were the ones that seemed the least agenda-led" whereas the female jury selected novels which had "issues" at their core (racial identity, poverty, etc.) The male jury were looking for novels of pure imagination while one of the principles of the Orange Prize is that novels should have something to say about the wider world. Walsh mentions that four years back Lisa Jardine, the chair of the Orange judges, was solemnly advising that "English writers should look further a field, look at worldwide issues for their subjects."
Accompanying Walsh's article about judging the prize, published in The Independent, were ten quotations in a box with the title "Classic fiction: But is the writer male or female?"
This issue of a female literature was discussed in Egypt and the Arab World during a period in which an increasing number of successful women writers emerged. One question was posed repeatedly: Are women more capable of writing about female problems than men? But of course there have always been male writers who have successfully delineated women's lives -- Ihsan Abdel-Quddous is one example that springs readily to mind.
In the end, however, I'll use a quote from Taha Hussein. "There's no such thing as male or female literature. There is only good and bad literature."
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