Memory, Voice, and Identity

Muslim Women's Writing from across the Middle East

Feroza Jussawalla, Doaa Omran, Feroza Jussawalla, Doaa Omran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Muslim women have been stereotyped by Western academia as oppressed and voiceless. This volume problematizes this Western academic representation. Muslim Women Writers from the Middle East from Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah (1899–1968) and Latifa al-Zayat (1923–1996) from Egypt, to current diasporic writers such as Tamara Chalabi from Iraq, Mohja Kahf from Syria, and even trendy writers such as Alexandra Chreiteh, challenge the received notion of Middle Eastern women as subjugated and secluded. The younger largely Muslim women scholars collected in this book present cutting edge theoretical perspectives on these Muslim women writers. This book includes essays from the conflict-ridden countries such as Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and the resultant diaspora. The strengths of Muslim women writers are captured by the scholars included herein. The approach is feminist, post-colonial, and disruptive of Western stereotypical academic tropes.

Section 1
Memory and Matriarchy

1 Memory of Latifa al-Zayyat between Influence and Ambivalence

Magda Mansour Hasabelnaby

Latifa al-Zayyat is one of the pioneers of the modern novel in Egypt and the Arab world, and a renowned feminist and political activist. The chapter investigates the assumption that al-Zayyat’s influence goes beyond her less famous contemporary, Fawziyya Mahran (1931–2019), to subsequent generations of writers who either saw her as a role model and an inspirational leader (Osman, Personal Interview), or questioned her status as a motivating pioneer altogether (Bakr, Personal Interview). These writers include Etidal Osman (born 1942), Salwa Bakr (born 1949), and the most celebrated Radwa Ashour (1946–2014) whose bond with al-Zayyat was the strongest. al-Zayyat’s impact is in fact transgenerational; Rehab Bassam (born 1977) repeatedly speaks in her blog-turned-into-a-collection-of-short-stories of her debt to Latifa al-Zayyat, whom she considered one of her “imaginary friends” (120).¹

Emphasizing the impact of Latifa al-Zayyat on later Egyptian writers, Ahdaf Soueif says:

Any summary of the life and work of Latifa al-Zayyat without conveying what she meant for a whole generation of young writers and critics in Egypt would be an injustice to the writer and the woman. Her involvement with young people was lifelong. Her time, advice, support—and at times her praise—were given generously and without stint. (130)

Using interviews along with textual analysis, this chapter will reveal the subtle connection between al-Zayyat, her fellow writers, and later ones. In addition, it will attempt to highlight recurrent tropes in the works of these writers while tracing them in the life and works of al-Zayyat.

The history of acknowledging the value of sisterhood and motherhood in feminist writing in Egypt goes back to the early twentieth century, where the Egypt-based Lebanese writer Mai Ziyada documented her indebtedness to three contemporary and earlier women writers (Malak Hifny Nasif 1886–1918; Aisha Taymur 1840–1902; Warda al-Yazijy 1838–1924).² Ziyada documented her appreciation of:

The efforts of those hardworking women who preceded our generation and opened the road for us. I say “opened the road”, though they have only placed a sign at the beginning of untrodden fields. Such sign, however, has a wide usage and a great value, especially when we take into consideration the time in which it was placed. (7)

This led Badran and Cooke to consider Ziyada “One of the first women to evoke a self-conscious sense of literary sisterhood . . . giving public recognition to foremothers, women with whom she could link herself in a line that gave weight and substance to what they and other later women might say” (xviii).

When Mai Ziyada passed away in 1941, she herself turned into a celebrated sister and/or an esteemed foremother for later writers who remembered her successes and cherished her legacy. Huda Shaarawy, the leader of the feminist movement and the founder of the first female syndicate in Egypt, pointed out the value of the attention Mai Ziyada gave to women’s literary production (al-Rouby 145). The reputation of Ziyada as a literary critic was posthumously celebrated by Widad al-Sakakini. al-Rouby suggests that al-Sakakini’s book, “Mai Ziyada: her life and her legacy was nothing but a continuation of a tradition which Mai herself had started when she wrote about her contemporaries motivated by a passionate feminism and a desire to carve a status for women in the field of literary achievements” (al-Rouby 145).

This tradition, “achieved a new level of activity in the 1970s and the 1980s, when Arab women increasingly wrote introductions to each other’s writings as well critical reviews on essays” (Badran and Cooke xiii). This level of activity continued to the present and was crystalized in the bond between Latifa al-Zayyat and her contemporaries.

The renowned male novelist, Bahaa Taher, wrote on this special bond. In Taher’s characteristically novelistic style, he draws a picture of al-Zayyat’s final illness and death as he visited her in the hospital, accompanied by their friend, the equally renowned critic Sabry Hafez. In this scene, Taher pictures, “all her students, friends, and the writers who learnt from her, standing outside the ICU” (131). He adds, “they have stayed awake the previous night till 5 a.m.; they would go to their homes and would come back soon seeking a glimpse of hope from a medical report on the pulse, or from a passing word from a doctor stepping out from the ICU” (Taher 131). A conversation between Taher and Hafez, which took place immediately after that hospital scene, is worth quoting here in relation to the memory of al-Zayyat:

My friend said as we walked out of the hospital to the road, maybe in an attempt to expel the blues that befell us: Female writers in Egypt are more loyal than male ones; I have never witnessed such attention from writers to a sick male author. I did not answer him. I did not want to say to him: “And do you know any male writer who spread all that love, compassion, and support that Latifa al-Zayyat generously extended to her students and companions?” (Taher 131)

The life and the works of Latifa al-Zayyat often underscored the strong ties between women’s personal experiences and larger social and political structures, especially in postcolonial Egypt. Her first book, al-Bab al-maftuh The Open door, published in 1960 is described by Hoda al-Sadda as:

A period piece as it typifies the revolutionary fervor and optimism of the 1950s, in the aftermath of the 1952 revolution by the Free Officers, the evacuation of British forces, and the mobilization of resistance to the Tripartite Assault on Egypt in 1956. (Gender xi)

The novel does this through its protagonist Layla, whose journey is an inspiring simultaneous discovery of feminist and nationalist identities. According to Amal Amireh, “The Open Door was simultaneously a product of its time and ahead of it.” Layla’s self-liberation, and her final epiphany as she passes through “the open door” and reunites with the nationalist masses, is in many ways reminiscent of Nora’s decision to slam the door behind her in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Both protagonists mark unique moments of transformational self-awareness and political activism, which stand out in feminist literature, within the two different cultures of Egypt and Norway, respectively.³ And just as “the door slammed by Nora shook Europe” (Lucas qtd. in Quigley 91), the one opened for Layla impacted gender dynamics throughout the Arab world. Layla’s epiphany and her author’s free spirit still reverberate in women’s lives and writing in Egypt to the present.

Latifa al-Zayyat’s final literary work, Ḥamlet Taftish: Awraq Shakhsiyya [The Search: Personal Papers], likewise blends the personal and the political, and equally balances chronicles of the self and narration of the nation. The journey between The Open Door and The Search is a journey from innocence to experience, through which the writer never reached Shaykhukha [old age], and hardly lost her passion and her revolutionary spirit. This is not to say that al-Zayyat’s effervescence was never quenched. Like her protagonist Layla, al-Zayyat went through a phase of withdrawal, which lasted for more than twenty years: al-Shaykhukha [Old Age], her second creative work was published in 1986 and was followed by other works in the 1990s. Publishing after such long “phase of artistic silence” to use al-Sadda’s expression (Gender xi) was one of many triumphs this writer accomplished.

Yet, it is important to note that al-Zayyat’s “artistic silence” during these twenty years never reflected a complete withdrawal, in spite of such “disillusionment.” Contrary to hermit-like writers who lived on the fringes of society, al-Zayyat, in the late seventies, co-founded the Committee for the Defense of National Culture, a group of oppositional intellectuals who worked against Zionism and colonial cultural imposition. She led the committee from 1979 to 1996. Her political activism during this period resulted in her imprisonment by the Anwar al-Sadat administration in 1981.

After earning her PhD from Cairo University in 1957 and twenty-four years before her political activism, al-Zayyat became a lecturer in the English department of the faculty of Women, where I graduated and continued to work there until her death in 1996. During her truce from publishing, al-Zayyat continued to write stories which were published later. She was active and dynamic in alternative arenas; an important one was supporting fellow women writers in academic, literary, and cultural circles—particularly emergent novelists, which is the focus of this chapter.

Of all the writers selected in this study, Fawziyya Mahran was the closest to Latifa al-Zayyat in age; al-Zayyat, who was only eight years older than Mahran, achieved more recognition as a novelist. Nevertheless, their relationship seemed free from competition and was exemplary in its strength and ideal in its quality. Mahran wrote a book about al-Zayyat that was published three years after al-Zayyat’s death. The title of the book, Awraq Latifa al-Zayyat Alsharisa wal Gamila [The papers of Latifa Al-Zayyat: The Fierce and the Beautiful], sums up how Mahran views the life journey of al-Zayyat in a context of both revolutionary struggle and aesthetic production.

An implicit intertextuality can be traced in Mahran’s short story “The Talisman” whereby the people’s rebellion is similar to the revolution that erupts in al-Zayyat’s The Open Door. The reader feels the same euphoria and warmth that Layla felt on the day she left school and melted into the masses of demonstrators who marched against the British colonization: “Everything around her was propelling her forward, everything, everyone, surrounding her, embracing her, protecting her. She began all of a sudden to shout again, in that voice that belonged to someone else, a voice that joined her whole self to them all” (al-Zayyat, The Open Door 49). In Mahran, the conflict gets bitter between the protagonist of the story and the wolves who chase her, and does not resolve except when she, in search of a talisman, fuses with others and melts with them. Only then, she wins without the need for a talisman:

I cannot stay still any longer . . . walls split and sounds exploded, rising from alleys and streets . . . These bodies smell of sweat and revolution. Hot bodies are vibrant. . . These are not sleeping people, nor dead people, who carry their shrouds. The sea split and swallowed the magicians with their ropes and sticks. I clung to the warm bodies . . . Shouted with my loudest voice . . . My tongue is a songbird. Until now, I do not know where I lost the talisman . . . It must have been lost in the crowd. . . . Tread by their feet . . . Or maybe it melted under the heat of my song. (Mahran 113–4)

Mahran compares revolution to life, and acquiescence to death, a comparison which recalls Mahmoud’s letter to Layla in The Open Door:

There is only one solution. The solution is for something amazing to happen, something that will shake those people to the core—all of those respectable, complacently settled folks. It has to be a miracle—only that will compel them to tear their shrouds to bits. Otherwise the situation will not change. The shrouds will not be torn apart because those folks will be holding so fast to the cloth and hiding themselves behind it. (al-Zayyat, The Open Door 135)

There is a remarkable difference in style between the two extracts. However, Mahran’s surrealism and quranic intertextuality still share with al-Zayyat the passionate glorification of the masses, which appears in The Open Door, and reverberates in later works. In Ḥamlet Taftish, The Search: Personal Papers, al-Zayyat speaks of “seeking refuge in the whole/the masses”:

A sea of young people move in waves over the Abbas bridge in 1956. The girl who found refuge in the masses is only a drop of sea water, she is fierce joy, and an overflowing active power. The I is the I, but the meaning is “we.” (al-Zayyat, Ḥamlet 61)

In his introduction to Mahran’s book, Awraq Latifa Al-Zayyat Alsharisa wa Algamila: [The papers of Latifa Al-Zayyat: The Fierce and the Beautiful], Hasan Atiyya excludes the idea that Mahran’s memory of al-Zayyat is merely “a proof of creativity in a bygone time.” Alternatively, he invites readers to view that memory as a paradigm for extension in time, where one generation hands over their fierce and beautiful papers to the next one. “We hope,” Atiyya adds, “that new generations will add ‘fiercer papers.’” The present time will not change its course without a force that realigns its position in favor of the whole (7).

Of the generation of writers that followed al-Zayyat, Salwa Bakr stands out as one of those fiercer voices, which pushed the revol...