|
CONTRIBUTION
Arab Women Novelists:
Creativity and Rights
By Bouthaina Shaaban
The story of Arab women novelists reflects, in many ways, the story of most women in different disciplines: it is the story of abundant creativity with very few rights or sometimes no rights at all. It is the story of a history locked in dark rooms or forgotten on library shelves. It is the story of a group of women who are absented from the literary scene simply because their creativity and attitudes proved to be different from men's, who were, and still are, the "main-stream" and the wholly arbiters who decide what is literally valuable and what is not. It is a story that went unnoticed for a hundred years because, as men related it, there was only one version of the official history of Arabic Literature.
During my school years in Syria my mind did not register Arab women writers' names. Very few of them were ever mentioned in our schoolbooks. I remember one short story writer and one poet during my 12 years of study.
|
|
My reading list always consisted of men writers. The cultural center used to send books to school every two weeks and I do not remember falling upon any book by a woman. Therefore my role models in Arabic literature were men, and, like everyone else, I quoted men and cited their opinions in whatever argument I was conducting. When I worked on my PhD in Britain on Shelley and the Chartist Movement, I had to go through all the Owenite and Chartist journals and had to read Mary Shelley and John Stuart Mill, as well as an incredible number of women activists and thinkers who used to write under pseudonyms or under the initial letters of their names. I started to wonder whether this history of British women writers, feminists, and activists didn't have an equivalent in Arabic literature, one of the oldest literatures in the world.
Hence, as soon as I got back to Damascus University in 1985 I started teaching my students
English romantic poetry and delving into the Arabic library to find out what Arab women had written and done.
I first discovered that the Arab women have a long history of journalism and that before the First World War many Arab women opened their own feminist presses, trying to reach a wide audience of both men and women and change their attitudes towards women's equality and rights. The first feminist journal, al
Fatat, appeared in Alexandria, in 1892. The woman who started it was a Syrian woman, called Hind
Nawafal, who was both the owner and the editor-in-chief. Her editorials demonstrated a strong feminist awareness and a dedication to women's cause. She wrote: " al Fatat is the only journal for women in the East; it expresses their ideas and unravels their inner minds. It fights for their rights and looks into their literature and thoughts and prides itself in their literary production." The editors of other journals, which appeared later, urged women who were concerned about the future of women to write "in order to better shape the future of their sisters and in order to enrich the literary heritage of women." These journals, which appeared in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, and to a lesser extent in Baghdad, published poetry, prose and literary criticism and concentrated on issues related to women's lives, whether these women were from the West or East. Most of these journals devoted a regular space to Western women and the relation between their liberation and Arab women's liberation. They stressed the necessity of learning from other women's experiences both in the East and West without alienating themselves from the roots of heir Arab culture. Another point, which was constantly stressed by the writers in these journals, was that the political liberation of the country was not possible without the emancipation of women. They stood against the theory that women have to join men in fighting foreign occupation and foreign mandate first and then, after independence, their rights can be discussed. In these journals most women stressed the interrelation between political struggle and feminist struggle, particularly as most men were arguing that women's issues should be deferred to later stage.
What is interesting is that some of these journals addressed theoretical and feminist issues with which, a hundred years later, we are still wrestling.
Discussing what today might be considered the relationship between patriarchy and women's creativity Labeba
Shamoun, the daughter of the poet Wardat al Yaziji, wrote:
I completely fail to see how a woman writer or poet could be bad for her husband and children.
In fact I see the absolute opposite because her knowledge and education would certainly reflect positively on her family and children. Historically, creative men have always been considered a blessing to their families. Men's creativity has never been considered a problem to the family or an impediment in the way of father's love to their children. So why should women's creativity be seen a problem rather than a blessing to their family and children? A man who sees an educated woman as his rival is impotent, and the man who considers his knowledge sufficient is mean and he who considers women's creativity to be harmful either to him or her is simply ignorant.
In another essay that unravels the social and psychological ills resulting from granting men unlimited power to divorce an author using the pseudonym Shajarat al Durr writes in 1898:
Fear of divorce distorts the mind and character of a woman and leads her to conspire against him and treat him as he treats her: an evil enemy instead of treating him as a loving friend. Women, in many cases, may find it necessary to use tricks and even lies in order to satisfy their husbands at any price because they fear their husbands as they would fear a totally untrusted person. Hence women try to be intelligent adversaries against those who hold the threat of divorce over their heads.
|
