Documenting Arab Women Novelists Leads To Re-Writing History

BY MAHMOUD SAEED

Yes, the Arab book market is flooded, and few books in this deluge merit note. A few new books deserve priority placement on readers' and libraries' book shelves.

Buthayna Shabaan's "Mi'aat 'Am Min al-Riwayat al-Nissa'yiat al-Arabiyya" (100 Years of the Arab Woman's Novel), published in Beirut by Dar Al-Adab in 1999, falls into this category. Shabaan is the author of several other works that explore themes regarding Arab women in the 20th century. Her work, "Women Talking About Themselves," was published by Women Press in London and Indiana University Press in the U.S. The author is a graduate of the University of Damascus Department of English Language; after she earned a doctorate from the University of York in Britain, Shabaan returned to Damascus and became a professor of comparative literature in the English department at her alma mater. Besides her academic career, she has been the editor of The Foreign Literature Magazine, published by the Union of Arab Writers.

Many Arab intellectuals consider the novel "Zeinab 1914" by Mohammed Hassan Haykal to be the first modern novel written in Arabic literature, but Buthayna Shaaban claims that another novel, "Husn Alawqab" (Best Results) by the Lebanese Zeinab Fawaz, is the first novel; it was published in Cairo by the Indian Press in 1899, predating "Zeinab" by almost 15 years.

Shabaan has found 13 other novels besides "Husn Alawqab" that appeared before "Zeinab." These novels include "Kalb Al-Rajul" (Man's Heart) by Labiba Hashem and "Hasna' Salunik" by Labiba Sawayya. The latter novel was serialized in the New York-based Al Huda newspaper, an early Arab-American publication. Both of these novels preceded "Zeinab" and have as much literary and artistic merit as that "first" novel, and both were written by women.

"100 Years of the Arab Woman's Novel" reveals another fascinating "first" in the history of the Arab novel. Afifa Karam, another Lebanese novelist, wrote "Badia and Fouad," a work that not only advocated reform and development, but also tackled the relationship between the East and the West. Most critics credit Toufic al-Hakim's novel "A Bird From the East," which was published in the 1930s, with exploring this subject first, but "Badia and Fouad" preceded Toufic al-Hakim's contributions by four decades. This early novel narrates a love affair which took place aboard a ship sailing from Lebanon to the United States, and it examines women's concerns along with issues like modernity and identity.

Challenging male claims to exclusive writing on social and political issues, Shabaan finds women's approach to political and social issues as astute if not more so than men's work. The novels "I Live" by Laila Baalbaki and "Ayam Ma'hu" (Days With Him) by Collette Khoury tackle sensitive political issues. When women write on day-to-day concerns such as commerce, trade, and transportation, the value of their contribution has been downplayed when compared to hardcore political issues like the Balfour Declaration and the Partition of Palestine. Shabaan wonders if we had "become aware of these issues at the time we would not be in a better position today?" Should greater importance be attributed to political issues that are never resolved or to the establishment of a strong economic base in the Arab countries?

The author refutes the criticism that women authors write only on love and family, marriage and children. In the novels she studied, women authors express different social, political, and moral points of view. This dismissal of women's writings on the grounds that their topics are unimportant or superficial has made "feminist literature" or "women's literature" suspect, a short-sighted view that forgets that Arab women authors, as Shabaan explains, have concerned themselves with issues of society for a long time. As long ago as the Jahilyya era, women poets, although few in number, dealt with issues of war, peace, justice, human rights, and wealth distribution. In modern times, works such as Ghada Samman's "Laylat al-Milyar" (The Night of the One Billion), clearly show that Arab women's literature has made significant achievements and reached levels which surpass women's domestic concerns and pertain to the Arab nation and the world at large.

The book also highlights an early political consciousness by Arab women writers, accounting for their activism. Over the years they have taken their demands to the streets calling for the release of nationalist leaders and opposing colonialist schemes for dividing the Arab world. In 1928, for example, a Women's Arab Union convened -- the first of its kind and 19 years before the establishment of the Arab League.

Through the decades, Arab women's novels have changed their portrayal of a male-dominated society from man being the enemy, rival, and persecutor into a new paradigm wherein man is a victim like woman, blindly obeying traditions and centuries-old customs. Between 1960 and 1967, women writers emerged and offered a liberating and progressive vision, identifying several social and political ills which they warned would be causes of defeat unless those issues were attended to in time. Thus, women anticipated the 1967 disaster long before their male counterparts.

Unlike most resources, "100 Years of the Arab Woman's Novel" emphasizes the modern novels appearing in the late 80s and early 90s, novels which gradually gained great popularity among readers. These novels enabled women to break out of the barriers placed around their work, and their books became popular best-sellers like "The Memory of the Body" by Ahlam Mustaghnami. Other novels were translated into several languages, including "The Nation in the Eye" by the Palestinian Hamida Nana, "The Tale of Zahra" by the Lebanese Hanan Al-Shaikh, and "The Laughter of the Stone" by the Lebanese Huda Barakat, along with many others. Shabaan ranks the most important novelists and chooses Sahar Khalife as the most important Arab novelist in the second half of the 20th century, for her contributions paved the way for the form and context of the feminist progressive novel.

Shabaan has shared the story of how she came to write this book with interviewers. Shabaan's interest in women's novels goes back to her early graduate studies in Britain, she explained in an interview with Mai Munasa of the Beirut-based An Nahar. "During my studies in Britain, I always liked to read the literature of Western women, their novels and poetry. I used to wonder, from the perspective of my academic specialization, are there Arab women with equal courage and vision as their Western counterparts.

When I started researching women novelists 10 years ago one critic cautioned me that there is no worse subject to study for there are no authors to examine other than Ghada Samman. All other works are insignificant, quite personal, and geared toward subjects of a failed romance," Shabaan told An Nahar. However, as she became involved in her research project, she found a well-developed and ever-growing world of Arab women's literature that was too much for one book. She discovered that it would be impossible for her to study all the women writers, for there were hundreds and some sources indicate as many as a thousand.

In her interview with Jihad Fadil in Al Hawadith magazine, Shabaan was quite open and detailed about the methodology she adopted in her research and the organization of her book. Her method utilized an inductive historical reading method; she attempted to read the novels of each period historically, politically, and socially, which required an accurate examination of the text and then relating its significance to the prevalent conditions of that given era. She emphasized that she did not want to impose any particular view on the text, but instead she "allowed the texts to lead" to the conclusions. Shabaan believes that most of the harm done to the Arab novel has been the result of applying pre-existing approaches and theories. "My mission was confined to discovering the text and then analyzing it." She also covered liberating women's journalism because most journalists were novelists, short story writers, or poets.

"Thus the reader will find that the first section offers a brief discussion of women poets in the pre-Islamic period and the period which immediately followed, to show how neglecting the role of women had appeared to some scholars as the natural thing to do," Shabaan told Al Hawadith.

The book's second section is devoted to the beginning of the Arab novel; the third to the women novelists between the 1920s and early 1950s; the fourth to novelists who faced women issues head-on throughout the 1950s, focusing on authors like Laila Baalbaki (1958) and Collette Khoury (1959); the fifth to works appearing between 1967 and 1980, when many novelists anticipated the 1967 setback; and the remaining four sections were devoted to war novels.

The most serious obstacle she faced during her research was how to sift through the large numbers of works and focus on those worthy of study. She chose two criteria: "first, my evaluation of the quality of the novel in artistic terms; second, the popularity of the novel among Arab readers."

Although pessimistic about the future of the Arab novel in the 21st century, the author of "100 Years of the Arab Woman's Novel" continues to call for correcting literary history; any analysis that overlooks these pioneering works remains distorted and incomplete "aim[ing] not only to marginalize women's contributions and cast doubt on their literary values, but also to distort the truth."

This book is a serious intellectual endeavor, the fruit of years of research and study of female literary and artistic productions in different Arab countries. That labor has culminated in a valuable social, political, and literary text that serves as a record of a whole century of Arab women's creativity.

This article appeared in Al Jadid Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 33 (Fall 2000)

Copyright (c) 2000 by Al Jadid