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In her memoir, Dreams of Trespass, Fatima Mernissi remembers asking her grandmother Yasmina how one can discern a true story from a false one. The wise old woman, Yasmina, told her granddaughter to relax and not look at life in extreme polarities because "there are things which could be both [true and false] and things which could be neither" (Dreams, 61). "Words are like onions," Yasmina explained further and "the more skins you peel off, the more
meanings you encounter" (Dreams, 61). Thus, according to Yasmina, the real
power of finding the "true" answer for oneself is to discover "multiplicities
of meanings" because then right and wrong become irrelevant (Dreams, 61).
Yasmina's image of words as onions can be used in one's understanding of
the multilayered complexity of oppression in Arab women literature. Although in
some novels, such as The Pillars of Salt and Drams of Trespass, female
oppression is an obvious result of social norms, in other texts (In the Eye of
the Sun, for example) the main female character, Asya Ulama, seems to be free
of any form of social pressure. However, one has to keep in mind that no woman
ever stands alone in her oppression, whether it is physical or psychological
oppression, or both. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to "peal off all the
skins of an onion" or to uncover all the different layers of female oppression
presented in the five books: Pillars of Salt, A woman of Five Seasons, A
Balcony Over Fakihani, Dreams of Trespass and In the Eye of the Sun.
The Feminist Theory
The feminist writer, Gloria Anzaldua, argues that in order for silence
to "transform into speech, sound and words," the silence must first ‘traverse
through our female bodies" (Making, XIII). According to Anzaldua, the female silence is richly layered and it hides
important voices which once discovered lead to women's liberation. Many
feminist writers would argue that women can only tell their stories when they
listen to (and follow) their inner voices. These inner voices are not only
singular voices of the "self" but also communal voices that connect women with
past and future generations. Thus, if one is to explore the oppression of
Muslim women through the work of Arab women novelists, one must keep in mind
the multilayered complexity of women's voices, or what I call the "community of
voices" that Arab women writers use in their texts. The community of voices is
the group of voices that has no boundaries in time and space, and it bonds all
women together as the victims of the same traditional oppression that is so
imbedded in all patriarchal societies. In the "community of voices," the voice
of one oppressed woman carries the weight of suffering of many other women,
from many different economical backgrounds. Each character from any one
feminist text articulates the historical and communal silence of many other
women (if not all of them)from that particular culture. Or to be more precise,
each Arab woman novelist, through her work, is giving a voice to oppressed
women in the Middle east.
Pillars of Salt
In Pillars of Salt, Fadia Faqir tells the stories of two Jordanian women
imprisoned in a mad house, through the use of different voices. Maha, a beduin
woman, harshly beaten and then sent to the madhouse by her brother Daffash and
the male leaders of the village, and Um Saad, a city woman whose husband, after
many years of marriage, marries another woman, share their stories of abuse and
humiliation. Both women, haunted by their pasts, tell their stories through the
scars on their bodies and souls.
Throughout the book, Maha remembers her husband Harb, "the twin of her
soul" and his love for her (Pillars, 9). On their first night together, Maha
recalls how she and Harb made love in the Dead Sea:
My body shivered as he undressed me. . . he hugged me tightly. . . hand
in hand we immersed our bodies in the warm water which
had been heated by the blazing sun all day. . . I swam closer to my
husband, stood up then kissed his forehead. . . my body burst with
heat and life. (Pillars, 54)
For Maha, Harb's love is the most important thing in her life, who gives her
the strength to face problems that build up later in her life. Many years after
Harb's death, Maha is still able to vividly recall memories of him. Through
these memories, Maha feels the presence of Harb's body: "The warmth of Harb's
hands seeped through my robe, and the dressing of my wound and comforted my
exhausted body" (Pillars, 104). Harb's love is deeply imprinted in Maha's body.
After Harb's death, Maha finds out that she is pregnant with his son and her
pregnancy helps her to overcome the sadness and loneliness from Harb's death.
Later, while in the madhouse, Maha remembers her son Mubarak and the nursing
period and she wants to feel his little mouth sucking her breasts. For Maha,
physical love is a necessary factor for a woman's survival.
Um Saad's memory of her husband is very different from that of Maha's. Um
Saad remembers how on her wedding night she was raped by her husband, Abu Saad.
She tells Maha how Abu Saad, a professional butcher came home every evening,
and that he "brought with him a rubber bucket full of stomachs and guts" and
she had to clean stains from blood every day (Pillars, 122). The image of Abu
Saad as a butcher, covered with animal blood suggests that he is not a gentle
man but a man who cruelly beats his wife and treats her just like a piece of
meat. . He takes from Um Saad's body what he wants: he fulfills his sexual
hunger and he impregnates her with eight sons. Thus, unlike Maha whose body "remembers" Harb and his gentle body, Um Saad recalls how disgusted she was with Abu Saad's naked body: "Like the meat he used to sell, he was lumpy and soft. I used to close my eyes, shut my nose, and hand my body to Allah. . . Abu Saad was a fat and ugly butcher. . . (Pillars, 122-23). Having sex with Abu Saad was like a burnt offering to a cruel God, nothing more than a sacrifice that she had to physically endure as a wife who does not love her husband.
Because she despised her husband, and hated being close to him, Um Saad
sees her body as a source of her unhappiness. She feels like her body is a
separate entity that somehow exists on its own with its energies destroying Um
Saad's soul and her spirits. She feels that her body is "discarded" when Abu
Saad "forces to open her legs" (Pillars, 109). Furthermore, whereas most
married women enjoy being pregnant and see the pregnancy and childbirth as
miracles of life, Um Saad dislikes changes in her body: "I hate my body, my
sticking out navel and the baby which was sucking my insides" (Pillars, 122).
Um Saad, who as a young woman was in love with another man, Mohammad, never had
a chance to experience true love. For Um Saad, her only moments of happiness
were in the kitchen: "Feeding my sons, filling their stomachs with delicious
food was my happiest time" (Pillars, 130).
Maha and Um Saad cannot stop talking to each other about their pasts.
Their hearts are so burdened by injustices done to them that nothing, not even
medication that they receive in the mental hospital can quiet their fragmented
voices from the past. The English doctor in the madhouse, Doctor Edwards, is
annoyed by Maha and Um Saad's talk. Like the men from Maha's village and Um
Saad's husband, the doctor wants to break the two women's spirit, and make them
submissive to the male will. The doctor keeps coming into Maha and Um Saad's
room to quiet them down: "You two never stop talking. I will increase the dose"
(Pillars, 110). When the increased dose does not help to quiet the two women,
the doctor loses control and starts shouting at the women in English and then
Arabic: "Shut up" (Pillars, 188). However, at the end of the novel the doctor
succeeds in quieting Maha and Um saad. Maha depicts how Um Saad looks after one
more electric shock: "Her face was pale as lemon. She had two bruises on her
temples covered with a thin layer of foul-smelling paste" (Pillars, 220).
Although Um Saad desperately wants the doctor to "wipe out" all her
memories "with a piece of white cotton," her suffering and injustice left deep
imprints in her soul (Pillars, 193). Maha, on the other hand holds onto her
memories, and keeps hoping that some day soon she will be re- united with her
son Mubarak. However, both women resist the doctor's treatment as much as they
can. Despised, broken hearted, old and weak, Maha and Um Saad cannot "roll into
another identity" as the men around them wanted them to. They cannot forget who
they are and what was done to them. Faqir gives voices to Maha and Um Saad, and
does not want the stories of their suffering to be unheard and forgotten.
Pillars of Salt suggests the repetition and multilayer-ness of the women's
experience. For example, Maha and Um Saad's stories represent the lives of
other women in the book. After her father dies, Maha's house, which she legally
inherited from her father becomes a place of gathering for all the village
women:
The women of the village considered my house their house and they came
every afternoon,carrying their embroidery, spinning, weaving and
stories. They would sip sweet tea, weave colorful rugs, and unload
the burdens of their hearts. (Pillars, 193)
At one of these gatherings, Maha realizes "how old and weatherbeaten" her best
friend Nusra looked. Nusra, who was raped by Maha's brother Daffash, could
never marry even though everyone in the village knew that she was an honest woman and that Daffash took
her virginity without her consent. Nusra became a fool of the village, where
she was mistreated even by the village children. At the same gathering, Maha
learns how "Hamda's husband got married to a second wife and left their
dwelling" (Pillars, 194). Hamda, who "used to be full of vigor and zeal looked
like a broken stem" (Pillars, 194). Nusra and Hamda's fates are similar to that
of Um Saad. UmSaad gets raped by her husband, Abu Saad leaves her for another
woman, and she ends up lonely and laughed at by her own children. In contrast
to Hamda, a young newly married woman, Jawaher, who comes to these
gatherings "choked with happiness" reminds Maha of her short happy life as a
married woman. Painting a picture of other women in the village, Faqir suggests
that many women in beduin society are cruelly mistreated by their husbands.
Their stories reflect the big picture of what has been going on in beduin
society for generations. When women are young, they dream of getting married.
If they have bad luck like Nusra, they become outcasts of society. If they are
lucky, as Jawaher and Maha, they can experience some happiness in their lives
while they are young and loved by their husbands. At last, if they are not
young and attractive anymore to their husbands, these women remind one of Hamda
and Um Saad who end up humiliated by their husbands and sons. Faqir also points
out that women can survive in Jordanian society only if they are lucky enough
to have good fathers and loving husbands.
A Woman of Five Seasons
Quite different from Maha and Um Saad is Nadia al-Faqih, the main female
character from A Woman of Five Seasons. Whereas for Maha and Um Saad's
survival, love plays an important role, Nadia does not think that a man can
make a woman happy. While married to a rich businessman, Ihsan ibn Natour,
Nadia is surrounded with diamonds, gold, expensive dresses and greedy people. When Nadia goes to parties, she sees how a rich woman's
world is spiritually empty:
All these gatherings and parties. Women, and more women, and still more
women, weighing one another up with smiles, and all the time, behind
it, longing to spring and pounce their prey. They flaunt their
soft silks and their perfumes from Paris, but it can't hide the
ugliness of those tongues. . . And all that cant and hypocrisy—
wailing how they miss their beloved homelands far away. They chose
to come and live abroad, didn't they? They certainly don't try to
hide those glittering diamonds on their necks and wrists and fingers! Diamonds,
and more diamonds, hiding backgrounds you can't be sure of half the
time— as it mattered anyway. . . (Five Seasons, 12)
For Nadia, who loves books and art, diamonds do not mean much. She accepts all
her husband's presents, but with a certain amount of reservation, because she
does not trust him. She does not want to be among the rich women whom she meets
at the parties. The rich women at these parties do not remind one of the
community of women in Maha's house. Whereas Maha's friends and neighbors try to
help each other, the rich women around Nadia are jealous of each other. Nadia
sees no real bonds between these women, only competition and "the ugliness of
tongues." When she points out to Ishan that she does not fit among these women,
he reminds her of her role in these competitive gatherings: "The point is to
let them see you, make them notice you" (Five Seasons, 12). Perhaps there are
some other wives of Barqais's upper class who come to the parties because they
feel obligated to their husbands and not because they enjoy showing off and
humiliating other women. However, the novel suggests that Nadia, who does not
develop any friendships with other women, stands alone in her refusal to be
treated as an expensive doll. Moreover, the happiness and the competition
between the women (as described by Nadia) suggest that the women at the parties
believe it is their role to show off how successful their husbands have become
in Barqais.
At the beginning of her marriage, Nadia is not much different from other
married women around her who follow the traditional path of submissiveness. She
is an obedient wife who listens to her husband's wishes. She leaves college in
order to stay home and bear children for Ihsan. However, this lifestyle does
not make her happy. Unable to accept Ihsan's greediness and his lack of
interest in books and art, Nadia gradually changes, isolating herself from
Ihsan. As she begins to search for her true identity, Nadia starts hearing the
voices of another woman within herself, a woman whose dreams are different from
those of Ihsan's:
The person inside me moved. I felt it wake as Ihsan thrust me toward the
slope. I hate to be what I'm not, to smile when I'm not happy, to
repeat words I don't believe, to kill time in empty reception room
talk, where there's only hypocrisy and falsehood. (Five Seasons, 35-
36)
As Nadia begins to follow the inner voice, her transformation from an obedient
wife to an independent woman becomes more evident as the novel progresses. She
slowly gains control over her body and at the end of the book she has gained
full control over Ihsan and his business.
Through her personal transformation, Nadia comes to what Western feminists
see as a "point of departure" with the "old self."This "old self" is the self
inherited by mothers as advice to their daughters:
I spring, don't I, from that beduin woman long ago, whose advice to her
daughters has been passed down through generations of women? ‘Do whatever he tells you. Keep all his secrets. Let him find only the purest fragrance in you.'" (Five Seasons, 33)
Through this passage, Nadia re-connects herself to the generations of women
before her who followed the same traditional path of submission and
voicelessness. One cannot help but think of Maha and all the women in Maha's
village whose fate is in the hands of male leaders who do everything to keep
women silent.
However, Nadia refuses old traditional female "skills." She simply cannot
accept to be a doll for Ishan; a doll which he dresses up in expensive clothes
and shows off to his business enemies. Whenever Ihsan tries to involve Nadia in
some of his "business schemes," Nadia feels inhabited by another person inside
herself:
Has he any idea, when he sees me as his "woman," of the way a great
snake bites at me? A rebellious snake, but helpless too. It coils
around, deep inside me. There's another person there inside me,
sexless, a person who feels and thinks and suffers, and makes me suffer.
A person who does not know the meaning of female and male, who rises
above anything Ihsan ever thinks about. (Five Seasons, 35)
Nadia' s spiritual rebellions become more frequent with each of Ihsan's
attempts to treat her as "his" woman, "his" wife, "his" doll. Nadia, who was
never in love with Ihsan, was unable to find the "twin of her soul" as, for
example, Maha did when she got married to Harb. The sexless, rebellious person
inside Nadia is angry and hungry. She is angry because she was disappointed in
her life, and she is hungry for a spiritual friend.
Like Um Saad, who loved one man and married another one, Nadia always
dreamed about Ihsan's brother Jalal, with whom she felt spiritually closer.
However, when Jalal gets drunk and reveals to her that he always loved her,
Nadia realizes that it is too late for her to seek a spiritual friend. She
becomes disgusted by Jalal's behavior. She realizes that each man just wanted
to possess her like some piece of valuable property. Nadia reclaims herself and
her body when she realizes that Jalal is not the man whom she constructed in
her dreams:
I'm not their woman. Not anyone's woman! I'd always supposed Jalal was
what he seemed, that he had real power to touch my inner being, to see
it in a sexless way and communicate with it. But to him I'm just
female— and he's a man. I— Nadia-al Faqih— no one will be able to
know or possess her. From this moment I possess myself. (Five Seasons, 108)
Nadia realizes that a woman's true power lies in her self-reclamation. If a
woman treats her body
as her own and not as her husband's property, then she can gain full control
over her life. However, Nadia's self-realization means isolation from all the
important feelings that she, as a woman, never had a chance to experience: a
mutual love and partnership. This leaves deep traces in her psyche. Not having
had a chance to love a man of her own choice, she becomes a bitter woman.
Perhaps one of the most revealing moments of who Nadia truly is comes when
Ihsan's sister Afaf tells Nadia how her husband, Faris, left her for another
woman. Instead of trying to console Afaf, who feels humiliated by her husbands
abandonment, Nadia asks her:"Do you really love Faris that much?" (Five
Seasons, 117). This question suggests that Nadia does not believe that there is
true love between a husband and a wife. Surrounded by men who bought their
wives' attention with money and gold, Nadia cannot conceive of the true, warm
feelings between partners. When compared with women such as Maha and Um Saad,
Nadia seems to be a cold and calculating woman. Her question to Afaf also
reveals how she might react if Ihsan were to do the same thing to her, leaving
her for some other woman. Nadia seems to be saying to Afaf that she should not
care. Later in the book, after she finds out about Ihsan's affair with one of
Rashid's women, Nadia does not react as a hurt woman. Instead, she sees her
opportunity to gain full control over her husband.
A Balcony Over the Fakihani
A very different world to that of Nadia and Ihsan's is the world of
Palestinian refugees described in A Balcony over the Fakihani.Yusra, a young
Palestinian woman, lives in a physically unstable and dangerous world. Yusra's
story is fragmented and it demands from the reader to be a witness to injustice
done to Palestinian people. As Yusra tells of her difficulties to
simply get water for her family, one cannot help but think how trivial Nadia's
struggle for self- reclamation seems when compared to Yusra's problems. Nadia
has a beautiful home and dresses, plenty of money and land, and Yusra— nothing,
not even minimum control over her life. In Yusra's world, female self-
reclamation is an abstraction and luxury.
When Yusra talks about her life in the refugee camp, Tal al-Zatar, she
describes a world in which nothing good could be expected. People in the camp
are so used to pain and loss that death does not come as something unexpected,
but rather death is a "familiar" thing (Balcony, 11). Yusra says that "there
was nobody in al-Zatar who didn't anticipate" the death of their own family
members (Balcony, 11). Whereas in A Woman of Five Seasons, the lives of people
are centered around material prestige, in Badr's book, life is centered around
physical survival. Whereas women in Barqais wait in their comfortable homes for
expensive presents from their husbands, women in the Tal al-Zatar wait for
death:
Everyone expected death; no one in Tal al-Zaatar thought to live out
their natural life. . . When father died the condolence people offered was the heartfelt wish that we ourselves should survive. Nobody knew what would happen any more. You'd be standing next to someone— and an hour later, you'd hear he was dead! (Balcony, 110)
Yusra's fragmented experiences of her life in the camp do not go through her
body, rather they inhabit her body. For Anazldua and other feminist writers who
point out the "traversing" of silence, Yusra's life is an example of how
infinitively subjective human experiences are. How does a woman like Yusra tell
the story of her life? How does she even start? In Yusra's world, there is no
time for grieving the dead because there is always a new death. If there is no
time for grieving, there is no time for silence to transform to speech. Yet,
Yusra speaks. Perhaps Badr wrote not a story , but a monologue, or a series of
dreams by a woman whose body is unable to process the pain, and whose body carries horrible memories.
Throughout "A land of Rock and Thyme," Yusra reminds us that her accounts
are part of what she remembers. Yusra's accounts are interchangeable series of
dreams, images and pictures. The book begins with a chapter called "The
Picture." This short chapter is actually Yusra's dream, in which she is walking
with her dead husband, Ahmed. She states how this dream overwhelms her:"My mind
is full of the picture, and I was impatient for the photographer to finish it"
(Balcony, 4). This sentence suggests much about the fragmented style of the
story. Who is the photographer who has to finish the picture in her mind?
Perhaps Israeli soldiers, for if they stop killing, the picture in Yusra's mind
could then be finished one day and she would have a chance to grieve.
Through her story "a land of Rock and Thyme,' Badr takes a step further
from Anzaldua and the Western feminists and suggests that memories and stories
are not only imprinted in the female bodies, but also in the physical
environments. Badr names one of her chapters "Water has a Memory." In this
short chapter, Badr tells about Yusra's everyday struggle to get water for her
family. Many things happened in Yusra's life while she was struggling to get
water for her brothers and sisters. One time while she was getting the water
her father died:
I received a shocking news: Father had been wounded soon after we left
and had lived on for another few hours. He saw everybody else, but when
they asked him: "Shall we send for Yusra?" he said, "let her get
the water for her brothers and sisters." That's what really hurt
me. If only I'd been able to see him, to talk to him— one word— while still
alive.(Balcony,10)
Not seeing her father for the last time deeply hurt Yusra and she will always
remember where she was and what she was doing while her father was dying. There
are also other memories of getting water. One day she witnessed the death of a
man next to her who was getting water for his family:
There were two taps where we filled up with water. Once, when I was
standing there, I suddenly became aware of a man next to me,
crying out: "Aah! Aah!" I looked at him and saw that he rolled over
on the ground and died. (Balcony, 11)
Whenever Yusra goes to the same place to get water, memories of death are
awakened. Whenever she drinks water, she must remember the death of her father
and a nameless man who lost his life for want of water.
In the final chapter of her novella "a Land of Rock and Thyme," Badr
describes how Ahmed loved taking photographs of "natural scenes." Displaced and
always moving from one place to another, Palestinian refugees remember their
homeland. They cannot carry their houses with them but they can carry images
and scenes everywhere they go. Through photography, Ahmed is able to preserve
some of his childhood memories and to create a world of hope and escape.
In Badr's other story, "A Balcony Over the Fakihani," Su'ad, another
displaced Palestinian woman, remembers her life in the apartment in Beirut
where she lived for some time with her family. Through Su'ad's voice, one is
able to picture the life of a Palestinian refugee in Fakihani. Whereas Yusra's
story is told mostly through fragments of Yusra's memory, "A Balcony over
Fakihani," is told by Su'ad, her husband Umar, and at the end of the story by
their friend and neighbor, Jinan. Like the two other couples Maha and Harb, and
Yusra and Ahmed, Su'ad and Umar love each other. Even as refugees, Su'ad and
Umar are able to make a new life for themselves. Su'ad remembers how happy
their first days of marriage were:
The first week was taken up with small parties we gave in the evening.
Lots of people would come with food and drink, and we'd sit in a big circle on the floor, swapping jokes and comments and singing the songs of Shaikh
Imam. (Balcony, 40)
Su'ad and Umar's parties are very different from those described by Nadia. In
Nadia's world, there was no sense of community or belonging. Nadia had no close friends. Su'ad and Umar, on the other hand, have little money but lots of friends. Su'ad remembers May 1973, when she gave birth to her twins, Ruba and Jihad, and the Lebanese army came into the Shatila camp and began to shell it. She remembers how she had to run with her newborn babies and how her baby daughter Ruba got "a white hair in the middle of her head" (Balcony, 46). The horrors of refugee life leave deep scars in Su'ad and her daughter Ruba's bodies.
Dreams of Trespass
Fatima Mernissi, in her memoir of her childhood, Dreams of Trespass,
depicts the lives of women within the domestic harem where Fatima herself was
raised. Fatima recalls how difficult it was for her as a girl to understand the
concepts of hudud, the sacred frontiers, and harem. As a child, she envisioned
hudud as something that must be visible, so that if she crossed this barrier,
this borderline, she would know it. When she asked her older cousin Malika to
show her "where the hudud was actually located," she learned that hudud means
to obey the teacher and parents (Dreams, 3). From her other cousin Samir, she
learned that "the frontier is in the mind of the powerful" and that she cannot
go and see the hudud because in "the landscape itself nothing changes" (Dreams,
2-3). From her father, Fatima learned that the hudud was created in order to
protect women from the troubles of the outside world. As she grew up Mernissi
could never accept the hudud as something given by God, because it did not seem
fair to women to be imprisoned and isolated from the outside world.
Fatima's real confusion about the hudud begins when she leaves her harem
in the city and goes to visit her maternal grandmother, Yasmina, in the
country. Fatima notices how women in the country have more freedom than women
in the city. However, after noticing the first visible
differences between the two harems, Fatima realizes that all women, both in the
city and in the country, are oppressed but in slightly different ways. Whereas
the harem in the country was "an open farm with no visible high walls,"
Fatima's harem in Fez was like "a fortress" (Dreams, 39). Fatima's grandmother
Yasmina and her co-wives were able to ride horses, go fishing, and they cooked
their meals over open fires. Women in Fez, on the other hand, were "surrounded
by high walls" and could never leave the harem without the permission of the
men. Fatima remembers how "all the windows in the harem in Fez opened onto the
courtyard" and there were no windows facing the street (Dreams, 57).
However, the physical freedom in the country did not always make Yasmina
happy. She always had to share her husband with his other wives, and like the
other women she had to live with a "frontier inside her head." For women in the
country, this meant they had to follow qa'ida, or the invisible rule. "Qa'ida
is everywhere" says Yasmina and adds that "most of the time the qa'ida is
against women." However, Yasmina and her co-wives try to not let frontiers to
stand in the way of their happiness. The wives try to work together at the
farm, and they help each other as much as they can.
In Fez, all men have only one wife, and in this sense, women in the city
can exercise more power over their husbands. Fatima's mother, for example, does
everything she can to improve her life in the harem. She gets up later than the
other women and eats breakfast by herself. She also has little picnics at the
terrace and dances and plays with her family, without interference from other
members of the harem.
Fatima remembers how the storytelling and dancing helped the women in the
harem deal with imprisonment and hudud. Fatima's aunt Habiba, who left her
husband's house and came to live
with Fatima's family in Fez, is full of stories. Her most popular tale "which
she narrated only on special occasion" was about "The Woman with Wings." The
woman with the wings could fly away from the courtyard whenever she wanted to.
Fatima recalls how this story influenced all the women in the harem:
Every time Aunt Habiba told the story, the women in the courtyard would
tuck their caftans into their belts, and dance away with their arms
spread wide as if they were about to fly. Cousin Chama, who was
seventeen, had me confused for years, because she managed to
convince me that all women had invisible wings, and that mine would develop
too, when I was older. (Dreams,22)
As a child, Fatima could not understand how women could have wings and fly.
When she goes to her Aunt Habiba and asks her how women can fly, Aunt Habiba
explains that "anyone could develop wings:"
It is only a matter of concentration. The wings need not be visible
like the birds'; invisible ones are just as good, and the earlier
you started focusing on the flight, the better. . . there are two
prerequisites to growing wings: "the first is to feel encircled and the second
is to believe that you can break the circle." (Dreams, 204)
Upon revealing her secret of flying, Aunt Habiba points out how women's
feelings of being enclosed within a limited space makes them use their
imagination to create images and stories to hold onto. This reoccurring image
of flying in the novel is similar to the images of flying to freedom in slavery
literature. Slaves, who had no personal freedom and were confined to a limited
space, survived by creating stories and songs in which they had wings and were
flying.
The slave-servant Mina, is another woman who teaches Fatima about freedom.
Mina, who was kidnaped by a slave trader as a child, and later sold to Fatima's
family, tells Fatima how she "liberates" herself through dance. Fatima, who
wants to be able to dance like Mina notices that some women in the harem
make "abrupt, jerky movements" unlike Mina who dances in "slow
motion" (Dreams, 162). Mina explains to Fatima the secret to good dancing lays
in a woman's ability to express her inner feelings:
Some ladies are angry with their lives, and so even their dance becomes
an expression of at. Angry women are hostages of their anger.
They cannot escape it and set themselves free, which is indeed
a sad fate. The worst of prisons is the self-created one. (Dreams, 162)
Mina's life philosophy is similar to that of Aunt Habiba and Yasmina. All three
women realize that the most important thing is to not let hudud interfere with
their dreams and wishes. All three women use their imaginations not only to
create a private space for themselves, but also to deal with the outside world
of oppression. Thus, although they are not physically free, their spirits are
free to fly to the places that they imagine.
In the Eye of the Sun
Ahdaf Soueif's novel, In the Eye of the Sun, is a story of a young
Egyptian woman Asya Ulama. Although Asya comes from a privileged Cairo family
in which she is the center of attention, Asya does not feel completely free.
Her problems become evident when she gets married to "the love of her life,"
Saif Madi. During their first night together, Asya experiences unbearable
physical pain and remains a virgin until her unfortunate miscarriage.
Although the novel is mainly told by Asya herself, there are parts in the
book in which the author enters Saif's mind and tells the story from his
perspective. Thus, for example, Saif describes how much he and Asya wanted each
other, but could not make love:
. . . I felt her soften I tried her again, and again I felt her grow
rigid and I said,"Don't you want to?" and she said , "Yes, of
course I do," but when I pushed she cried out. I stopped and
pulled back and after a bit her breath evened out and I tried again, and she
cried out, but then she said, "No, do it do it please let's get it
done," when I pushed hard she bucked under me trying to get away and
cried that it hurt too much. . . (Eye, 258)
After an unsuccessful first night, they tried many times to make love, without much success. Each time they try Asya grows "all frozen on him" and "sneezes" each time Saif comes near her. Finally, Saif decides to leave her alone for a while and tells Asya that he loves her enough "to live with her like a sister," and Asya becomes upset (Eyes, 302). Remembering how much she wanted to be with Saif at the beginning, she expects him to somehow make things work. In her mind,
Asya wants Saif "to romance her, to seduce her, to make her want him" and not
simply assume that they were going in bed together (Eye, 302). When she sees
that Saif is not going to "seduce" her, Asya chooses not to talk to him,
instead she begins to believe that he already knows what she wants. Thus,
unlike a happily married couple who might try to talk and solve problems, Saif
and Asya never talk.
When Asya moves to England to work on her Ph.D., the couple's relationship
does not improve. When they are not together, Asya and Saif love each other and
cannot wait to be together. However, whenever Saif comes to visit Asya in
England and they try to be close, Asya's pain stops them from being intimate,
and they spend their time together fighting. On one on his visits to England,
Saif tells Asya that Ummu Salma, the woman who comes to clean his house, tries
to seduce him. When Asya asks him if he feels tempted to be with Ummu Salma, he
says that Ummu Salma is "enormous" and then jokingly adds: "if you can't lift
it, don't screw it" (Eyes, 419). One cannot help but wonder why is he telling
this story to his wife. Perhaps he is trying to make her jeaolus, or make her
realize how attractive he is to other women. On another occasion, Saif tells
Asya that if she ever has a lover he expects her to "at least have decency not
to tell him" about it. He also lets her go with his friend Mario, and lets
Mario visit Asya when he is not in England. All these incidents between Asya
and Saif suggest how much both of them took their relationship for granted.
They did nothing to become closer, instead it seems that, without realizing it, they did everything to destroy their marriage.
How much Asya and Saif have grown apart is probably most evident when they
meet in a hotel in London, just before Asya's decision to spend the night with
an Englishman, Gerald Stone. When Asya asks Saif if he wants her to stay with
him in London until he finishes his meeting, Saif tells her to do what she
wants. However, Asya wants to hear from him that he wants her to stay. For
Saif, who is immersed in his work, Asya's cry for attention is irritating and
he tells her that her "demands" on his time and his emotions have
become "intolerable" (Eyes, 507). When Saif decides to leave her to go to his
meeting, Asya recognizes that Saif really does not care what she does:
He stands and looks at her. In his look she sees a solid refusal to be
surprised, to be reconciled— even to be angry; a refusal to have anything to do with the melodrama she is creating. (Eyes,
508)
For many months and years to come, Asya admits that this image of Saif leaving
her never left her. When she remembers the way Saif left her in the hotel, she
feels as though something could have been done to stop her adultery. She knows
that this last meeting of theirs was somehow the reason for her fall:
This image will be used to mark the beginning of her descent— of all
their descent— into what she was later to call ‘the bad bit.'At the
moment, of course, she feels it is the end; she believes she has
reached alone— the nadir— the pure distillation of misery, weakness
and humiliation. (Eyes, 508)
Perhaps at this "revelatory" moment, Asya finally realizes that she is not the
only one to be blamed for the problems in her marriage. She sees that Saif has
his own faults and that by pushing her away, the gap between them only widens
even more.
Later in the book when Asya decides to spend the night with Gerald Smith,
she does not think about Saif. On that crucial night, Saif is very distant from her, and she can only ask herself "why not" try something different:
And why not? Thinks Asya, as she rises and walks the five steps and
sinks to the floor between Gerald Stone's denim knees. Why not? Why not ‘baby' and ‘babe' and ‘honey' and ‘sugar'? Why should she always be ‘sweetie' and ‘princess' and never this, never this, never to be kissed and caressed and undressed and looked at and admired, never to feel hot breath on her face on her neck, never to feel a man's hands on her breasts, on her waist, on her tummy. . . (Eyes, 539)
Asya completely forgets Saif and all his attempts to make love with her. All
she wants is to try something different, to find out how it is to be admired in
a different way. This opposition between ‘sweetie' and ‘princess' on one hand,
and ‘baby,' ‘babe' and ‘honey' on the other hand, not only points out the
differences between Saif and Gerald's characters, but also reveals the
conflicting emotions hidden in Asya's body. One part of her wants to be ‘baby'
and another part still wants to remain ‘princess.'
However, in order to understand Asya's struggle for freedom, one must
recognize that she is a product of her environment. She is an upper class, rich
Egyptian woman who wants to be both: Egyptian and English; married and free;
have an Egyptian husband but an English lover. Thus, her search for freedom
may never be completely over, because it is not always possible to have
everything one dreams about.
Conclusions
Although Fadia Fqir, Leila Atrash, Liyana Badr, Fatima Mernissi, and Ahdaf
Soueif might not always consider themselves feminists, their work is about Arab
women and their personal struggles for self-definition. All the female
characters discussed in this paper speak not only about their personal experiences but also reflect the many other voices of those women whose stories could never be heard for many different reasons. To break the silence, to speak for themselves and to educate the world about injustice and to bring about equality between the sexes is what inspires these authors to write. All their characters speak through the first person narration which in the feminist discourse is an elemental requirement for liberation. "To speak the self is to make oneself a warrior" says Audre Lorde, a black feminist writer. The "I"-ness in feminist discourse continually reasserts the belief that the personal is political— one of the basic principles of feminist consciousness. Speaking, putting the "self" into words exposes the writers, making themselves and their issues visible in the societies that want to keep women silent. Thus, the community of voices that these five arab women novelists create is a community of new emerging feminist voices that will always refuse to surrender.
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