A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (17 page)

The first of these trends has to do with the connection between contemporary literature and politics. While many Arab writers have
been imprisoned by the governments under which they have lived, with others having been either unable to publish or forced to live abroad, today a general weariness of politics seems to have become the norm. This apparent depoliticization is presented either as a variety of postmodern distrust of ‘grand narratives’ or as a reaction to the climate of religious conservatism that has reigned in the Arab world over recent decades. In this way of looking at things, the turning away from politics is related to disappointment at the failure of earlier aspirations for social and political change or apprehension in the face of current events. Many works, including some of those discussed below, contain evidence of a stifling atmosphere of oppression.

A second trend is the striking growth in the number of women writers, and the increasing interest both in excavating the voices of women from the past and in reflecting on particular features of ‘women’s writing’. One recent critic, for example, has spoken of what he calls the ‘feminization’ of the ‘literary field’ in contemporary Egypt,
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while others have pointed to the women writers that have emerged in Lebanon, the best known of whom is probably Hanan al-Shaykh.
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These developments have been accompanied by growing interest in Arab women’s writing abroad, which goes some way towards explaining the thinking behind recent translations.

Finally, a third trend, linked to the first two, has been the emphasis placed on individual experience in contemporary writing at the expense of larger, public themes. This ‘lyrical’ trend, going hand in hand with the deconstruction of large narratives, has led to an emphasis on experience sometimes felt to have been excluded from mainstream literature. There has been a growth in writing dealing more explicitly with sexuality, for example, notably through its treatment of gay themes, as well as a growth in ‘regional’ or ‘ethnic’ writing. Writers in Egypt have drawn attention to Nubian identity over recent decades, while the Libyan author Ibrahim al-Koni has written a series of novels drawing attention to the Tuareg people in the Sahara.

Illustrations of postmodernist styles in contemporary Arabic literature can be found in the form and the content of recent texts. One such might be Miral al-Tahawy’s
Blue Aubergine
, a novel which could also be discussed in the context of contemporary women’s writing.
³
Another might be Ahmed Alaidy’s
Being Abbas el Abd
, a stylish debut novel.
⁴
Al-Tahawy, born in 1968, first attracted attention for
The Tent
, a novel which draws on her Bedouin background,
⁵
while al-Aidy, an Egyptian author born in Saudi Arabia in 1974, apparently intended
Being Abbas el Abd
to be a kind of anti-novel or comic book and certainly as a text situated outside ordinary literary categories (an influence is Chuck Palahniuk, author of
Fight Club
). Both these novels experiment with reproducing personal experience in the face of confusing social demands, employing a kind of postmodernist collage of different registers of language to do so.

Blue Aubergine,
the story of a young woman who bears this nickname, is an assemblage of texts, including memories, fantasies, fragments of dreams, authorial comments, scribbles, interpolated stories and bracketed extracts from a PhD thesis entitled ‘The Dialectic of Rebellion and Gender Oppression’ that is written in an academic
langue du bois
that is just one of the novel’s many styles. These texts, jostling against each other, possess no obvious hierarchy. The narrator’s comments, seemingly authoritative, are seen ironically, for example, and the psychological discourse on which they draw is undermined by the surrounding noise. When the narrator intervenes early on in the text to comment that Blue Aubergine will understand her childhood feelings only ‘when she has read many pages and drawn lines, as she thumbs through her sources, under the words rebellion and guilt and aggression between the mother and her daughter,’ it is suggested that this is just another handy re-description of Blue
Aubergine’s confusing experience. It is not authoritative, and it does not trump others. The novel apparently contains no single key.

Nevertheless, individual experience seems to offer a vantage point on the jostling possibilities surrounding Blue Aubergine. ‘Our neighbour was the first man to talk to me about Marx and the rotten bourgeoisie and the patriarchal system and sexual freedom. He offered to give me lessons in philosophy and psychology one school year, and then he stuck his hand under the table’ and made a pass, she remembers. Personal experience, if not entirely devaluing what the man had to say, at least invites scepticism about it. ‘I cried in front of him but he just continued talking about intellectual awareness and self-criticism and the military wing, and imitation and innovation.’ Described as ‘drowning in the present’, Blue Aubergine is assailed by competing political and social discourses, some of them coming from her father’s generation and Arab nationalism and socialism (‘Abdul Nasser’s revolution, that’s the only true solution’), some of them filling present horizons with the ‘third way’ of religious discourse and cultural specificity (‘East or West, Islam is best’). Sometimes understanding can be gleaned from reading authoritative-sounding academic texts, reassuring bits of which are spliced into the narrative. The upshot seems to be that though the discourses surrounding Blue Aubergine are more or less devalued and are parts of what is felt to be a threatening linguistic jungle, personal freedom remains a value to aim for, one expressed, for example, in an adolescent dream. ‘People came … looking through the eyes of a woman, bulging and misshapen. She came and did the same thing; she slapped me on the face. “I can look at boys any time I want to,” I said. “The streets are full of them.”’

Blue Aubergine
’s demand for self-expression is echoed in al-Aidy’s
Being Abbas el Abd
. This novel, told backwards, presents a confused and confusing mass of competing possibilities that include consumer products, drugs, sex, seductive movies, American lifestyles, bits of pan-Arab politics, echoes of nationalism, all of which are
zapped through like satellite television channels or product lines in shopping malls. The novel contains a lot of text-messaging on mobile phones, disorientation being the main feature of the street-smart main character’s experience. Like
Blue Aubergine
, it is striking both for its assemblage of texts taken from wildly differing discourses, American television to pop psychology, suggesting no significant hierarchy among them, and for the way in which it treats the political, cultural or nationalist thought of previous generations, parodying, misquoting or draining it of meaning by pulling statements out of their original contexts and trivializing them in others. Some of these remain useful as ‘great quotes’, but on the whole they are revalued (devalued?) in irreverent postmodern terms. Of the political aspirations of previous generations, the narrator comments that Egypt has now ‘had its Generation of the Defeat’, in other words the generation that fought the Israelis over Palestine. ‘We’re the generation that came after it. The “I’ve got nothing left to lose generation”. You want us to progress? So burn the history books and forget your precious dead civilization. Stop trying to squeeze the juice from the past.’

Growing interest in ‘women’s writing’ in recent years, particularly from the developing world, has benefited modern Arabic literature, and it has enhanced awareness of this strand of Arab social and intellectual history, both at home in Arab societies themselves and abroad among those interested in Arab cultures and societies. While this is not the place for a survey of Arab feminism, some background may be necessary to understand modern literary writing by Arab women.
⁶

The origins of modern Arab feminism are often dated, like so much else, to the period of the
nahda
in Egypt and in particular to the alliance between nationalism and the struggle for women’s rights in the work of reformers in the circle around Abdu mentioned in
Chapter 2
. The work of nationalist and feminist women’s
organizations, such as the one set up in Cairo in the early decades of the century by the pioneering feminist Huda Sharaawi, was also important in advancing women’s causes. Qassem Amin, a member of Abdu’s circle, presented the intellectual case for women’s rights in the liberal manner adopted by Mill a generation before, and Sharaawi took her cue both from Amin’s promotion of women’s rights within the context of the struggle for political independence and from contemporary feminist activism in Europe. Her agitation for women’s suffrage in Egypt took place at much the same time as that of the suffragettes in Britain; for example, women were demonstrating in the streets of Cairo against the British occupation in 1919, one year after British women over the age of thirty had been given the right to vote.

Amin presented the case for Arab women’s rights in two books published at the turn of the century,
The Liberation of Women
and
The New Woman
.
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In the first of these, he announces that ‘I do not believe there is a single educated Egyptian who doubts his country’s immense need for reform’, adding that this needs to start in the family. ‘The status of women,’ he says, ‘is inseparably tied to the status of a nation’, which leads to the proposition that the status of the nation will remain low as long as the status of women within it is low. While ‘the Islamic legal system, the
Shari’a
, stipulated the equality of women and men before any other legal system’, this original equality has been lost, and men of his generation commonly ‘despise’ women, destroying their minds by denying them education and trivializing their lives by denying them a role in society’s affairs. ‘What do you understand a woman to be?’ he demands of his (presumably) male readership. ‘Like a man, she is a human being.’ However, generations of distorted thinking have caused this to be overlooked, with the result that women have become unfit for their roles as wives and mothers. They make poor wives, since a man will ‘conceal his joys and sorrows from’ an uneducated wife with whom he has little in common. They make
imperfect mothers, since they are unable to awaken the intellectual curiosity of their children. At best, such women are ‘pleasant pet[s]’, Amin says, like the ‘angels in the house’ that populate the works of Dickens. At worst, a man ‘despises [his wife], treats her as nonexistent, and excludes her from his affairs.’

In her discussion of Amin the Egyptian historian Leila Ahmed draws attention to the connections between women’s emancipation and national development and between the restoration of the original equality enjoyed by men and women in the Muslim religion and the modernization of the condition of women to bring it into line with international norms. (Amin makes unflattering comparisons between the ‘advanced’ condition of women in Europe and their ‘backwardness’ in Arab societies.) These features of his thought place it in the mainstream of the
nahda
: there is the emphasis, for example, on the renovation of Arab society by restoring what has become corrupted and by imitating European models; there is the concern that Arab societies, in imitating Europe, may be in danger of losing part of themselves. These things had the negative effect of suggesting that ‘improving the status of women entails abandoning native customs’, with resistance to improvement carried out under the impact of western ideas functioning ‘as a sign of resistance to imperialism, whether colonial or postcolonial.’ Styles of traditional dress, such as the veil, seen by Amin as a sign of female seclusion, were ‘tenaciously affirm[ed] as a means of resistance to Western domination,’ for example, making women’s authenticity dependent on veiling and living in a ‘traditional’ way.
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Concerns of this kind were also raised about the work of Huda Shaarawi, founder and first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, and president of the Arab Feminist Union on its founding in Cairo in 1944, which had branches throughout the Arab world. Shaarawi and her associates fought for the improvement of women’s education and working conditions, as well as for political suffrage. In
many of these campaigns she was disappointed, since, as she explains in her memoirs, while women had taken part at the side of men in the struggle for political independence, their ‘great acts and endless sacrifices do not change men’s views of women’.
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Sharaawi was born into the aristocracy, and she was, her translator explains, a member of the last generation ‘to experience harem life from childhood through mature adulthood’. Women of her class ‘lived their lives within the private enclosures of the domestic quarters. When they went out they veiled their faces, thus taking their seclusion with them,’ rather in the manner of the Ottoman women described in Pierre Loti’s novels. It was while she was on the way back from an international conference in 1923 that Sharaawi publicly removed her veil on her arrival at Cairo railway station. For her, this signalled the casting off of inherited attitudes and the advent of the new woman. For her opponents, it represented a betrayal of authentic ideas of the feminine and the blind imitation of the West. These differing views have resonated down the decades.
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