[ Followups | Post Followup | Open Discussion | Help ]

Overcoming Barriers: Women Seeking Happiness

Posted by M. Barkley on May 11, 2007 at 19:40:54:

M. Barkley
Arab Women Novelists’ Work
May 11, 2007

A barrier is defined as something that blocks or denies access. For women in the Arab world, barriers can be anything from family, to education, to nationality. In each of the novels Pillars of Salt by Fadia Faqir, A Woman of Five Seasons by Leila Al-Atrash, Dreams of Trespass by Fatima Mernissi, and In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif, the female characters overcome social and personal barriers on their journey to define their own identities. In Pillars of Salt, we meet two women imprisoned in a mental hospital during and after the British mandate of 1921. Maha, a Bedouin peasant from the Jordan valley was married to a resistance fighter named Harb. Um Saad is the wife of a prosperous butcher in the city of Amman, Jordan. The two women recount their lives and struggles leading up to detention in the mental institution. The novel A Woman of Five Seasons takes place in a fictional gulf country of Barqais in the 1970s. Nadia and her husband Ihsan are Palestinian emigrants to the country, seeking their share of the oil profits. Throughout the story, Ihsan’s desire to dominate and compete everyone and everything forces Nadia to give up things that she enjoys in order to be a more traditional wife. Dreams of Trespass tells the story of Fatima Mernissi’s childhood in a domestic harem. Born in 1940 in Fez, Morocco, Fatima recalls the struggles of the women around her as well as her own quest to understand what it means to be in a harem. Asya, the main character in the novel In the Eye of the Sun, is from an upper middle class Egyptian family. Asya tries to understand herself and what she wants out of life, and struggles to develop her individuality while being a member of a society that refuses to see her as an individual. Society can be a obstacle for women in many ways. Religion, social class and wealth, culture and adaptation, and marriage can both create and deny individual freedoms.

Religion (not just Islam, but Christianity and Judaism as well), promote a general distrust of women. The “blame” in holy texts is often placed on the woman. Women are often portrayed as witches, a title which has connotations both of alluring and seductive, as well as ugly, vicious, and malicious woman. This distrust is basis for many other barriers that face women in the Arab world. Laws and cultural norms are aimed at “protecting” women from the effects of their spitefully seductive nature. The element of distrust of women by men is also in part due to the realization of the pain and suffering that women go through. In Pillars of Salt, this is illustrated by the killing of a baby girl and the pain that the women of the tribe feel for the child:
…when the first female child was buried alive by the tribe
of Bani-Quraish. When the tribe was told that they had a daughter instead of a son, their faces turned black… It is
that first girl child, killed in sin, that set the
blood-feud between men and women. Her cry echoes in female
hearts calling for revenge. That's why no man can trust his
wife, no Lord can trust his mistress. (Faqir 3)
Religion affects not only how people treat each other, but it also affects how women see themselves. In Pillars of Salt, Maha is very firm in her beliefs and desires to be a good Muslim woman. We see the opposite with Asya in In the Eye of the Sun. Asya commonly mocks Muslim and Arab tradition.

Asya and Maha are also very different in their socioeconomic backgrounds. Maha is a Bedouin woman, while Asya is from an upper middle class family. Each novel covers a different socioeconomic background. In Pillars of Salt, Um Saad is from a middle class family. In A Woman of Five Seasons, Nadia comes from a Palestinian family exiled from their homeland but she becomes very rich after her husband starts a successful company in London. In Dreams of Trespass, Fatima’s family’s wealth is modest. The level and type of education each woman receives varies with the wealth of the family. Both Nadia and Asya received instruction in western style schools, and they both sought upper level degrees. Even though Nadia never completed her degree, she retained her love of the arts and literature. Maha is never educated in school; rather she learns life lessons from her experiences and from the elders in her community. Um Saad and Fatima, both received limited instruction in religious schools run by their local mosques. The educations of Maha, Um Saad, and Fatima were not designed to produce a self sufficient woman. “Education is to know the hudad” (Mernissi 3). The hudad is the boundaries of the frontier. The religious schools taught women not to trespass these boundaries and assured them that as long as they stayed on their side of the boundary they would lead a happy life. We learn that, in these women’s lives, that was sadly not the case.

Women also struggle with the conflict of modern vs. tradition and Eastern vs. Western. There is great condescension in the Arab world towards Arabs who act western or modern. In Dreams of Trespass, Fatima’s grandmother Lalla Mani states the traditional views of cultural progression:
Anything which violated out ancestors' legacy, she said,
could not be considered aesthetically valuable, this
applied to everything from food and hairstyles to laws and
architecture. Innovation went hand in hand with ugliness
and obscenity. (Mernissi 207)
The impact of western society had very different effects on the women in the novels. For Maha and Um Saad, western influence has brought misery and incarceration. For Nadia it is a western woman who inspires her to take charge of her life. Asya is already fairly westernized. This is because of her upbringing and travels in her educational career. For Fatima, western culture is more of a curiosity than an major factor in her daily life.
Marriage is one of the most important elements in an Arab woman’s life. Marriage often times is not about love. Nadia says, “Marriage was the aim – a strange, confused feeling, somewhere between getting a husband and finding love” (Al-Atrash 40). There are examples in these novels of women who chose their spouse (Maha, Asya) and women who had no choice (Um Saad, Nadia). Some of their husbands even chose to take second (or more) wives. Fatima’s grandmother Yasmina lived in a harem with her husband and co-wives. Fatima laments:
…a harem meant misfortune because a woman had to share her
husband with many others. Yasmina herself had to share
Grandfather with eight co-wives, which meant that she had
to sleep alone for eight nights before she could hug and
snuggle with him for one” (Mernissi 34).
Asya’s friend Chrissie and Um Saad both had husbands who took second wives, as did the husband of Nadia’s sister in law Ifaf. Ifaf’s husband and Chrissie’s husband divorced their second wives. Chrissie husband yielded to her desires and Ifaf’s husband was convinced by her brothers Ihsan and Jalal. Unlike Ifaf, Um Saad did not have brothers (or a father) to stand up for her and to fight for her dignity, and she was doomed to be neglected for the rest of her life.

Um Saad’s story is particularly sad because she exemplified the "perfect" Muslim wife. She bore her husband 8 sons. She was humble and followed directions. And she never refused her husband. Despite her misery, it was far worse to be a divorced woman. Fatima’s aunt Habiba was divorced and because of this she did not have a say in most family matters. She was forced to stay on the outside of discussions and refrain from taking sides. Even after Asya’s marriage began to fall apart, divorce was a undesirable option.

A large part of marriage is the conception of children. Women are supposed to get pregnant on their wedding night or very soon after. Asya, wanting to continue her education uninhibited, did not want to have children right away. She went to the doctor to request birth control but was denied access. The concept of not wanting children is difficult for most Arab people to grasp. Without the contraception, Asya becomes pregnant soon after she is married. Infertility is a cause of shame and humiliation for a woman trying to conceive. Maha experiences a stint of infertility. She is forced to see the “midwife” for some particularly gruesome treatments designed to expel evil spirits from the body. In A Women of Five Seasons, Ihsan wanted children to keep Nadia from finishing her education. Nadia wanted children to prove her womanhood:
Might it be that I was different, that I couldn’t
conceive?... I was preparing for second year finals. But I
couldn’t think of anything beyond proving I could be a
mother. After months of ceaseless worrythe doctor confirmed
I was pregnant, andwe both relaxed. I’d proved my
womanhood…(Al-Atrash 41)
Their children are only mentioned in passing a few times in the novel. Nadia and Ihsan seem relatively unconcerned with their children and end up sending them to boarding school.

The topic of sexuality and sexual fulfillment from a woman’s perspective is often overlooked. Virginity and honor are social customs in Arab society. Regardless of whether or not the woman was forced, losing ones honor is essentially the loss of ones life. In Pillars of Salt, Maha’s friend Nasra was raped by Maha’s brother Daffash. Nasra now had no hope of getting married or having a normal life. "My friend had lost her virginity, her honor, her life. She was nothing now. No longer a virgin, absolutely nothing. A piece of flesh. A cheap whore" (Faqir 11).

In marriage, sex is considered a duty rather than a source of enjoyment and communication. Both men and women view sex mainly as the tool for having children. With episodes like Um Saad’s, it is not hard to see why women would not associate sex with pleasure and a deep connection to their husbands:
At night, the man, my husband… chased me and ripped my
dress apart. Then he asked me in a weak, thin voice that
made the bulk of his body look like a mistake, ‘Have you
had your period?’ I shook me head. ‘All the same.’ He
looked at me assessingly, patted my hairless stomach with
his cold fingers, forced my legs open, then penetrated my
discarded body. ( Faqir 109)

Lack of sexual fulfillment caused the ruin of Asya’s marriage to Saif. Even before she was married, Asya had sexual encounters that proved challenging to resist. During a study trip to Italy, Asya has an intimate relationship with another student named Umberto. Although they do not have sex, there was sexual tension between them. Asya wanted to explore her feelings without losing her virginity. She came very close to losing her virginity on that same trip. After a night of partying, Asya awoke to a man on top of her. She recognized him from earlier in the night. She wanted to have sex with him but knew that she shouldn’t. Umberto comes to her rescue pushing the man off, but the arousing feeling Asya got from the experience changed her forever. Asya wanted more than ever to be with Saif, even before their wedding. However, on Asya and Saif’s wedding night, Asya could not stand the pain and made Saif stop. A void opened between Asya and her husband that would follow them throughout their relationship. Asya and Saif relationship resembled a platonic relationship more than it did a marriage. Despite her resistance to Saif, Asya lusted after other men. The first was Saif’s friend Mario. Mario was in university as well and the two often spent time together. Asya found herself fantasizing about him. “How can she think that so easily? ‘Spend the night in his arms’?... What about being afraid of the pain? The only reason she doesn’t think of the pain is that it’s been almost twenty months since anything has happened to give her a reason to think about it” (Soueif 415).

Asya and Saif’s intimacy problem contributed to another hurdle plaguing women in Arab society: communication breakdown. Asya and Saif’s communication problems started early on in the relationship. Saif, for unknown reasons, insisted on lying about trivial things. He told Asya he had a dog, even though the dog died years earlier. He told her his bedroom was upstairs when it was downstairs. He said that his mother was tall and had long brown hair when she was actually short and had short black hair. After their marriage, things do not improve. “Chrissie, he won’t fight. He won’t argue. He won’t talk if it gets heavy. He’ll put on a record, light a cigarette and open a book. He thinks I’m stupid – and hysterical. And of course I sound stupid and hysterical. I can hear myself” (Soueif 297). In A Woman of Five Seasons, Nadia and Ihsan also have communication problems. Ihsan is close minded and dismissive of Nadia’s opinions and thinks that all he has to do is buy her nice things to make her happy. “Does he know where he’s pushing me? Does he even care? Hasn’t it ever struck him, just for a second, that I don’t want all this” (Al-Atrash 13). Lack of communication and understanding between men and women is prevalent in Arab society. In Dreams of Trespass, Fatima’s cousin explains, “Separation creates an enormous gap in understanding. ‘Men do not understand women… and women do not understand men, and it all starts when little girls are separated from little boys in the hammam” (Mernissi 242).

Lack of communication goes hand in hand with objectification, mental abuse, and physical abuse. In Pillars of Salt, Maha was subjected to all of these things from her brother. "He yanked my hair. Filthy rat, ugliest woman on earth. Do what I tell you. All that would check the flow of insults and slaps was my father's long wooden stick. Then, Daffash would apologize and give me a packet of foreign chocolates" (Faqir 21). Other women in the community, especially the older women, facilitate the mistreatment of women by perpetuating such ideas as inherent inferiority. "What do you expect? He is a boy. Allah placed him a step higher. We must accept Allah's verdict" (Faqir 33). Nadia experiences mental abuse from both her husband Ihsan, and her first love (and Ihsan’s brother) Jalal. Ihsan insists on calling her “kitten.” She is disgusted by the name but is powerless to stop him from using it. Ihsan feels that Nadia, like a pet kitten, is there soley for his pleasure. “I don’t like rose-red,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to wear it.’‘But it’s my favorite color.’ ‘Well, I hate it. Don’t you wear things to please me?” (Al-Atrash 96). The constant oppression causes Nadia to imagine what could have been if she had married her first love Jalal. They shared a love of the arts and literature and she felt that Jalal would understand her and respect her feelings more than Ihsan did. Nadia becomes disillusioned with Jalal after he tries to force himself on her.
And now all he could see in me was a female he could throw
away or pick up at his leisure. I felt bitter loathing and
esentment, and that inner being began to stir, then grow
furious, savagely beating my very head. (Al-Atrash 106)
Maha, Um Saad, and Asya all witness and experience physical abuse; Maha at the hand of her brother, Um Saad at the hand of her father, and Asya at the hand of her husband. Asya also witnesses the results of domestic violence while she was in training to be a nurse in University in Cairo. The nurse showing her and Chrissie around narrates:
This woman here: this is a boiling-water injury’- pulling
back the sheet- ‘worse you can see around the face and neck
than on the legs. Her husband threw the pan at her and he
aimed high. This one’ – pulling back the sheet - ‘kerosene.
Very severs.’ In a lower voice, ‘Set fire to herself. Very
common. A couple of cases every week. Young girls, mostly.
A fight with her family. Wants to marry her cousin or
whatever and they won’t let her so she rushes into the
kitchen, pours kerosene over herself and throws a lit match
on to her dress. (Soueif 85)
Chrissie herself also experiences physical abuse from her father on a regular basis. Early in the novel, she is beaten because her brother sees her walking in the street with a Palestinian colleague name Bassam.

Family is the cornerstone of every individual. Family plays a big part in the development and education of women. In Pillars of Salt, Maha’s mother, Maliha, passed away, but continues to be a source of stability for Maha. Maha has a very supportive father but an unsupportive brother. It is Daffash who is supposed to be taking care of his father in his old age but in reality it is Maha who takes care of their father and the farm.
What lay behind my father's misery was just one person, one
word, Daffash. He wanted a good son. A peasant capable of
digging his hands into the soil and transforming that piece
of land into a green orchard. Allah gave him a womanizer
and a city-worshipper… “My son is lured by the city lights.
He navigates by false stars. Look at Sheikh Talib's sons.
How they have kept their plough in the soil from sunrise to
sunset!” (Faqir 20)
In addition to taking on Daffash’s responsibilities in caring for the farm, Maha does the “womanly” tasks of cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes. Um Saad did not have the familial support that Maha had. Um Saad was unwanted and was told that on a regular basis. She was beaten and neglected as a child, and abused as an adult. Her parents married her off without even telling her. Her mother got her dressed up and her parents walked her to her new home. Only at the new home did she learn whose marriage it was.

Family is very important in the novel Dreams of Trespass. The Mernissi family lives in a harem in Fez Morocco. This domestic harem is defined by the men’s desire to keep the women secluded and the desire not to break the family apart. Fatima lives with her mother and father, uncle, aunts, grandmother, and cousins. The women disagree about the necessity and logic of harems. There is one camp that sees it as necessary to a well functioning society, and the other camp sees harem life as wrongful imprisonment.

Asya in In the Eye of the Sun, struggles to get out from underneath the shadow of her parents. Wherever she goes people know her as the daughter of Lateefa Mursi and Mukhtar al-Ulama. Because of her parents’ positions at the university, Asya too is expected to follow in their footsteps. Asya’s friend Noora clashes within her family because she is in love with a Palestinian man names Bassam. Her family eventually cuts off contact with her. Non-Palestinian families do not want their daughters to marry Palestinian men because they are viewed as unstable.

Arab communities support the Palestinians in their cause, but at the same time reject them because of the perceived instability. This situation is described best in the novel A Balcony over Fakihani by Liyana Badr. The first two novellas of this book outline the lives of two Palestinian women, Ysra and Suad. Ysra’s story begins in the refugee camps of Southern Lebanon. Her father is killed by a shell while she is fetching water for the family. Later, her brother is murdered as they fled a refugee camp. Her husband, a resistance fighter from the West Bank, is killed in an Isreali air raid on South Lebanon. Suad lives with her husband and children in the Fakihani district of Beirut. Her husband Umar survived a near fatal illness but is killed in a bomb blast that destroyes their home. Their lives are a far cry from the lives of Nadia and Asya. The conflicts that you hear about in passing in the other novels are front in center in the live of Yrsa and Suad. Nadia notes the attitudes of the Palestinians in Barqais:
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’re all, apparently, the
daughters of families with influence, descended from the
cream of society. It makes you wonder if those far-off
homelands ever had and farmers in the, or servants, or
laborers, or small merchants maybe” (Al-Atrash 12).
Ysra tells of the daily realities of the Palestinians that have remained close to their homeland and are directly involved with the struggle, “Shells often bounced into the middle of groups of people, and the only ones who survived were those protected by fate” (Badr 11).

Maha has a connection to another resistance cause. Her husband Harb, is a resistance fighter against the British in Jordan. Although she is not on the front lines, her life is still affected. Throughout her marriage, her husband is often way doing battle with the enemy. Harb is killed in an air raid and Maha is left to raise their son on her own. Harbs death starts a chain of events that will eventually lead to her imprisonment in a mental institution. After Harb’s death, Maha went to live with her father. A fight ensued between her and her brother Daffash over ownership of the farm. Maha was committed by her brother as a way of gaining control of the family farm. Um Saad was committed by her husband after her mental stability was pushed to the breaking point because he took a second wife. In the institution, both women are far away from their homes and are being denied their life's passion; raising their children. Even before Um Saad was committed to the mental institution she was held captive. Both as a child and as an adult she was not allowed to venture outside her home. Even as an adult, when sitting on the veranda of her own home surrounded by trees and vines, her husband made her wear a veil. This is similar to the women in the city harem in Dreams of Trespass. The city harem, where Fatima lived, had high walls and gates. The harem where her maternal grandmother lived had no walls, no gates, and no guards. In the country harem, the frontiers are mental.

A woman’s own mentality can be her biggest barrier. Women take very seriously their role as Muslim women. They chose to do things out of duty rather than love or because they enjoy them. When asked if she ever loved her husband, Um Saad responded that she coexisted with him. Because she felt it was her duty to be a good wife regardless of love, she repressed her own feelings and desires.
I loved the scent of honeysuckle, but I tried hard to get
used to the smell of black iris. The stink of guts used to
turn my stomach upside down. I tamed my stomach, trained my
stomach even to like the stink. When Abu Saad slept with
me, I kept my mouth shut. I had a husband, children, and
grandchildren. I go used to the lack of conversation
between us. We just coexisted" (Faqir 159).
Some women sought material goods to fill the void left by an unhappy marriage or general discontent with their lives. Nadia describes such women that she encounters at dinner parties, “They flaunt their soft silks and their perfumes from Paris, but it can’t hide the ugliness of those tongues, tearing into guests who’ve just left or the people who haven’t come” (Al-Atrash 12).

Sometimes it is the reflection on choices and decisions that cause angst and discontent. Nadia often reflects on her decision to marry Ihsan. She feels that she would have been much happier if she had married Jalal. “I couldn’t wait for Jalal… I was a girl looking for marriage and love together, and Ihsan was ready to give me both. And so I agreed” (Al-Atrash 41). Asya is equally concerned with her own actions and decisions. After her extra marital affair, Asya waits for the guilt to take over “but there is nothing: she surprises herself by how well and how peacefully she has slept. By how wide awake and full of energy she immediately feels” (Soueif 540). Both women lacked the willingness to stand up for themselves. After making defiant statements, or resolving to do what they wanted, Asya and Nadia almost instantaneously feel guilty for resisting and go along with their husband’s plan. Asya even goes so far as to apologize for having opinions different from her husband.
What is truly remarkable about all of these women, is how they overcome the barriers surrounding them, and no matter how small the victory, refuse to be just another victim. In Pillars of Salt, Maha is faced with an irresponsible brother, infertility, the death of her husband, and the loss of her land. Maha, handles both the affairs of the farm as well as taking care of her father in old age. Despite difficulty, Maha and her husband Harb do conceive. Even after the death of her husband and the loss of her land, Maha still has the vigor to defend what’s hers, even if the odds are against her. Maha took the opportunity to speak her mind to Daffash and to the community as a whole. "First, I don't talk to rapists… Second, I don't talk to disobedient sons. Third, I don't talk to servants of the English… I will get married to nobody, I will not sign any deeds, and I will never cook for the English" (Faqir 217). Um Saad’s victory is unassuming in nature, but no less important. Despite her efforts to be the perfect wife, Um Saad is locked away in a mental institution. Her freedom comes in the form of a friend. All her life she had been neglected, mistreated, and disrespected, and there in the mental institution, she gained an ally in her struggle. Someone who cared about her and could sympathize with her. For once she had gained solidarity with another woman.

In A Woman of Five Seasons Nadia’s transformation begins with her revalation about her first love Jalal. She founf the strength to fight for herself, "I don't know when and how I lifted my palm and slapped him. The giant in my depths was surging furiously out, with boundless strength- my inner being forked in my limbs, turned to a giant liberating itself from the corridors of fear and weakness" (Al-Atrash 107). She proclaims, "I'm not their woman. Not anyone's woman! ... I – Nadia al-Faqih—no one will be able to know or possess her. From this moment on I possess myself" (Al-Atrash 108). Her transformation gets a boost when she meets Jessica. Jessica is the manager of the London office of Ihsan’s company. Nadia sees Jessica as a successful happy independent woman and she (Nadia) aspires to be like that. She wants to own her own real estate business, read more books, and explore the arts. In her fifth season “The Heaveny Bodies Break from Their Spheres.” Ihsan’s business deals break down, his finances are left in ruins, and he is disgraced in Barqais. On the contrary, Nadia has made quite a life for herself. Nadia becomes the one with the power in the relationship. Even after she learns of Ihsan’s affair she refuses to publicize it, but not for Ihsan’s sake, “but to preserve my dignity and your image in front of the children” (Al-Atrash 168).
Fatima, in Dreams of Trespass, begins to understand the intricacies of male/female relationships and the meaning of being in a harem. The older women in the harem have hope that their daughters will not end up in a harem like they did. The younger girls are allowed a privilege that the older women did not get: The privilege of going to a western system school with the boys. It is Fatima’s mother who fights to get her into the new school. In the western style school she will learn math, science, and other subjects that will help her build a life for herself. Although the older women were denied the chance to learn to read, they found peace in smaller victories. Fatima’s mother sometimes skipped meals “altogether, especially when she wanted to annoy father, because to skip a meal was considered terribly rude and too openly individualistic” (Mernissi 76). The older women retained control of their traditional beauty treatments refusing to use imported manufactured products. Embroidery and Chama’s plays also created an escape for the women and a chance to express themselves.

Asya struggles to find herself and to find fulfillment. Sexually, she finds fulfillment in Gerald. Initially, she thinks her attraction to him is love, but soon realizes that it is merely physical. She gets the attention and satisfaction from Gerald that she could not get from Saif. “...there is no more pain but intimations of pleasure...” (Soueif 542). Even though she cheats on Saif, she comes to the conclusion that she does love him and that he does love her. They end up getting a divorce, but in her description of her perfect man, she includes many things that were true of Saif. Asya finishes her PhD and satisfies her required tenure at the university. She then works for a publishing company in London.

From these women’s stories, we can see that Arab culture designed so that women are not supposed to be individuals. Women are not supposed to have identities separate from that of their family. "I wanted to slip into another identity. Can you cast off your identity like diry underwear? Can you?' 'Identity? What is identity? I think I have none.' 'Maha, poor Maha" (Faqir 80). Women are the glue of the family unit. Ihsan's mother kept the family out of poverty by selling her jewelry. Maha's mother Maliha was the rock that she and her father depended on even in death. The women of the harem were the backbone of the family and kept the household running smoothly. Tradition teaches individuality as the detriment of the family unit. But these stories show us that individuality is the strength of family units. Each woman sought to exercise their freedom, to explore their individuality, and to command respect. In short, each woman seeks happiness. Fatima’s mother wisely points out that this happiness need not be separate from family and loved ones, and that in fact individuality thrives on the love and involvement of family:
Happiness… was when a person felt good, light, creative,
content, loving and loved, and free. An unhappy person felt
as if there were barriers crushing her desires and the
talents she had inside. A happy woman was one who could
exercise all kinds of rights, from the right to move to the
right to create, compete, and challenge, and at the same
time could feel loved for doing so… Happiness was to be
with loved ones, and yet still feel that you existed as a
separate being, that you were not there just to make them
happy. (Mernissi 80)

Followups

Post a Followup

Name:
Email:

Subject:

Comments:
: M. Barkley : Arab Women Novelists’ Work : May 11, 2007 : Overcoming Barriers: Women Seeking Happiness : A barrier is defined as something that blocks or denies access. For women in the Arab world, barriers can be anything from family, to education, to nationality. In each of the novels Pillars of Salt by Fadia Faqir, A Woman of Five Seasons by Leila Al-Atrash, Dreams of Trespass by Fatima Mernissi, and In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif, the female characters overcome social and personal barriers on their journey to define their own identities. In Pillars of Salt, we meet two women imprisoned in a mental hospital during and after the British mandate of 1921. Maha, a Bedouin peasant from the Jordan valley was married to a resistance fighter named Harb. Um Saad is the wife of a prosperous butcher in the city of Amman, Jordan. The two women recount their lives and struggles leading up to detention in the mental institution. The novel A Woman of Five Seasons takes place in a fictional gulf country of Barqais in the 1970s. Nadia and her husband Ihsan are Palestinian emigrants to the country, seeking their share of the oil profits. Throughout the story, Ihsan’s desire to dominate and compete everyone and everything forces Nadia to give up things that she enjoys in order to be a more traditional wife. Dreams of Trespass tells the story of Fatima Mernissi’s childhood in a domestic harem. Born in 1940 in Fez, Morocco, Fatima recalls the struggles of the women around her as well as her own quest to understand what it means to be in a harem. Asya, the main character in the novel In the Eye of the Sun, is from an upper middle class Egyptian family. Asya tries to understand herself and what she wants out of life, and struggles to develop her individuality while being a member of a society that refuses to see her as an individual. Society can be a obstacle for women in many ways. Religion, social class and wealth, culture and adaptation, and marriage can both create and deny individual freedoms. : Religion (not just Islam, but Christianity and Judaism as well), promote a general distrust of women. The “blame” in holy texts is often placed on the woman. Women are often portrayed as witches, a title which has connotations both of alluring and seductive, as well as ugly, vicious, and malicious woman. This distrust is basis for many other barriers that face women in the Arab world. Laws and cultural norms are aimed at “protecting” women from the effects of their spitefully seductive nature. The element of distrust of women by men is also in part due to the realization of the pain and suffering that women go through. In Pillars of Salt, this is illustrated by the killing of a baby girl and the pain that the women of the tribe feel for the child: : …when the first female child was buried alive by the tribe : of Bani-Quraish. When the tribe was told that they had a daughter instead of a son, their faces turned black… It is : that first girl child, killed in sin, that set the : blood-feud between men and women. Her cry echoes in female : hearts calling for revenge. That's why no man can trust his : wife, no Lord can trust his mistress. (Faqir 3) : Religion affects not only how people treat each other, but it also affects how women see themselves. In Pillars of Salt, Maha is very firm in her beliefs and desires to be a good Muslim woman. We see the opposite with Asya in In the Eye of the Sun. Asya commonly mocks Muslim and Arab tradition. : Asya and Maha are also very different in their socioeconomic backgrounds. Maha is a Bedouin woman, while Asya is from an upper middle class family. Each novel covers a different socioeconomic background. In Pillars of Salt, Um Saad is from a middle class family. In A Woman of Five Seasons, Nadia comes from a Palestinian family exiled from their homeland but she becomes very rich after her husband starts a successful company in London. In Dreams of Trespass, Fatima’s family’s wealth is modest. The level and type of education each woman receives varies with the wealth of the family. Both Nadia and Asya received instruction in western style schools, and they both sought upper level degrees. Even though Nadia never completed her degree, she retained her love of the arts and literature. Maha is never educated in school; rather she learns life lessons from her experiences and from the elders in her community. Um Saad and Fatima, both received limited instruction in religious schools run by their local mosques. The educations of Maha, Um Saad, and Fatima were not designed to produce a self sufficient woman. “Education is to know the hudad” (Mernissi 3). The hudad is the boundaries of the frontier. The religious schools taught women not to trespass these boundaries and assured them that as long as they stayed on their side of the boundary they would lead a happy life. We learn that, in these women’s lives, that was sadly not the case. : : Women also struggle with the conflict of modern vs. tradition and Eastern vs. Western. There is great condescension in the Arab world towards Arabs who act western or modern. In Dreams of Trespass, Fatima’s grandmother Lalla Mani states the traditional views of cultural progression: : Anything which violated out ancestors' legacy, she said, : could not be considered aesthetically valuable, this : applied to everything from food and hairstyles to laws and : architecture. Innovation went hand in hand with ugliness : and obscenity. (Mernissi 207) : The impact of western society had very different effects on the women in the novels. For Maha and Um Saad, western influence has brought misery and incarceration. For Nadia it is a western woman who inspires her to take charge of her life. Asya is already fairly westernized. This is because of her upbringing and travels in her educational career. For Fatima, western culture is more of a curiosity than an major factor in her daily life. : Marriage is one of the most important elements in an Arab woman’s life. Marriage often times is not about love. Nadia says, “Marriage was the aim – a strange, confused feeling, somewhere between getting a husband and finding love” (Al-Atrash 40). There are examples in these novels of women who chose their spouse (Maha, Asya) and women who had no choice (Um Saad, Nadia). Some of their husbands even chose to take second (or more) wives. Fatima’s grandmother Yasmina lived in a harem with her husband and co-wives. Fatima laments: : …a harem meant misfortune because a woman had to share her : husband with many others. Yasmina herself had to share : Grandfather with eight co-wives, which meant that she had : to sleep alone for eight nights before she could hug and : snuggle with him for one” (Mernissi 34). : Asya’s friend Chrissie and Um Saad both had husbands who took second wives, as did the husband of Nadia’s sister in law Ifaf. Ifaf’s husband and Chrissie’s husband divorced their second wives. Chrissie husband yielded to her desires and Ifaf’s husband was convinced by her brothers Ihsan and Jalal. Unlike Ifaf, Um Saad did not have brothers (or a father) to stand up for her and to fight for her dignity, and she was doomed to be neglected for the rest of her life. : : Um Saad’s story is particularly sad because she exemplified the "perfect" Muslim wife. She bore her husband 8 sons. She was humble and followed directions. And she never refused her husband. Despite her misery, it was far worse to be a divorced woman. Fatima’s aunt Habiba was divorced and because of this she did not have a say in most family matters. She was forced to stay on the outside of discussions and refrain from taking sides. Even after Asya’s marriage began to fall apart, divorce was a undesirable option. : : A large part of marriage is the conception of children. Women are supposed to get pregnant on their wedding night or very soon after. Asya, wanting to continue her education uninhibited, did not want to have children right away. She went to the doctor to request birth control but was denied access. The concept of not wanting children is difficult for most Arab people to grasp. Without the contraception, Asya becomes pregnant soon after she is married. Infertility is a cause of shame and humiliation for a woman trying to conceive. Maha experiences a stint of infertility. She is forced to see the “midwife” for some particularly gruesome treatments designed to expel evil spirits from the body. In A Women of Five Seasons, Ihsan wanted children to keep Nadia from finishing her education. Nadia wanted children to prove her womanhood: : Might it be that I was different, that I couldn’t : conceive?... I was preparing for second year finals. But I : couldn’t think of anything beyond proving I could be a : mother. After months of ceaseless worrythe doctor confirmed : I was pregnant, andwe both relaxed. I’d proved my : womanhood…(Al-Atrash 41) : Their children are only mentioned in passing a few times in the novel. Nadia and Ihsan seem relatively unconcerned with their children and end up sending them to boarding school. : The topic of sexuality and sexual fulfillment from a woman’s perspective is often overlooked. Virginity and honor are social customs in Arab society. Regardless of whether or not the woman was forced, losing ones honor is essentially the loss of ones life. In Pillars of Salt, Maha’s friend Nasra was raped by Maha’s brother Daffash. Nasra now had no hope of getting married or having a normal life. "My friend had lost her virginity, her honor, her life. She was nothing now. No longer a virgin, absolutely nothing. A piece of flesh. A cheap whore" (Faqir 11). : In marriage, sex is considered a duty rather than a source of enjoyment and communication. Both men and women view sex mainly as the tool for having children. With episodes like Um Saad’s, it is not hard to see why women would not associate sex with pleasure and a deep connection to their husbands: : At night, the man, my husband… chased me and ripped my : dress apart. Then he asked me in a weak, thin voice that : made the bulk of his body look like a mistake, ‘Have you : had your period?’ I shook me head. ‘All the same.’ He : looked at me assessingly, patted my hairless stomach with : his cold fingers, forced my legs open, then penetrated my : discarded body. ( Faqir 109) : Lack of sexual fulfillment caused the ruin of Asya’s marriage to Saif. Even before she was married, Asya had sexual encounters that proved challenging to resist. During a study trip to Italy, Asya has an intimate relationship with another student named Umberto. Although they do not have sex, there was sexual tension between them. Asya wanted to explore her feelings without losing her virginity. She came very close to losing her virginity on that same trip. After a night of partying, Asya awoke to a man on top of her. She recognized him from earlier in the night. She wanted to have sex with him but knew that she shouldn’t. Umberto comes to her rescue pushing the man off, but the arousing feeling Asya got from the experience changed her forever. Asya wanted more than ever to be with Saif, even before their wedding. However, on Asya and Saif’s wedding night, Asya could not stand the pain and made Saif stop. A void opened between Asya and her husband that would follow them throughout their relationship. Asya and Saif relationship resembled a platonic relationship more than it did a marriage. Despite her resistance to Saif, Asya lusted after other men. The first was Saif’s friend Mario. Mario was in university as well and the two often spent time together. Asya found herself fantasizing about him. “How can she think that so easily? ‘Spend the night in his arms’?... What about being afraid of the pain? The only reason she doesn’t think of the pain is that it’s been almost twenty months since anything has happened to give her a reason to think about it” (Soueif 415). : Asya and Saif’s intimacy problem contributed to another hurdle plaguing women in Arab society: communication breakdown. Asya and Saif’s communication problems started early on in the relationship. Saif, for unknown reasons, insisted on lying about trivial things. He told Asya he had a dog, even though the dog died years earlier. He told her his bedroom was upstairs when it was downstairs. He said that his mother was tall and had long brown hair when she was actually short and had short black hair. After their marriage, things do not improve. “Chrissie, he won’t fight. He won’t argue. He won’t talk if it gets heavy. He’ll put on a record, light a cigarette and open a book. He thinks I’m stupid – and hysterical. And of course I sound stupid and hysterical. I can hear myself” (Soueif 297). In A Woman of Five Seasons, Nadia and Ihsan also have communication problems. Ihsan is close minded and dismissive of Nadia’s opinions and thinks that all he has to do is buy her nice things to make her happy. “Does he know where he’s pushing me? Does he even care? Hasn’t it ever struck him, just for a second, that I don’t want all this” (Al-Atrash 13). Lack of communication and understanding between men and women is prevalent in Arab society. In Dreams of Trespass, Fatima’s cousin explains, “Separation creates an enormous gap in understanding. ‘Men do not understand women… and women do not understand men, and it all starts when little girls are separated from little boys in the hammam” (Mernissi 242). : : Lack of communication goes hand in hand with objectification, mental abuse, and physical abuse. In Pillars of Salt, Maha was subjected to all of these things from her brother. "He yanked my hair. Filthy rat, ugliest woman on earth. Do what I tell you. All that would check the flow of insults and slaps was my father's long wooden stick. Then, Daffash would apologize and give me a packet of foreign chocolates" (Faqir 21). Other women in the community, especially the older women, facilitate the mistreatment of women by perpetuating such ideas as inherent inferiority. "What do you expect? He is a boy. Allah placed him a step higher. We must accept Allah's verdict" (Faqir 33). Nadia experiences mental abuse from both her husband Ihsan, and her first love (and Ihsan’s brother) Jalal. Ihsan insists on calling her “kitten.” She is disgusted by the name but is powerless to stop him from using it. Ihsan feels that Nadia, like a pet kitten, is there soley for his pleasure. “I don’t like rose-red,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to wear it.’‘But it’s my favorite color.’ ‘Well, I hate it. Don’t you wear things to please me?” (Al-Atrash 96). The constant oppression causes Nadia to imagine what could have been if she had married her first love Jalal. They shared a love of the arts and literature and she felt that Jalal would understand her and respect her feelings more than Ihsan did. Nadia becomes disillusioned with Jalal after he tries to force himself on her. : And now all he could see in me was a female he could throw : away or pick up at his leisure. I felt bitter loathing and : esentment, and that inner being began to stir, then grow : furious, savagely beating my very head. (Al-Atrash 106) : Maha, Um Saad, and Asya all witness and experience physical abuse; Maha at the hand of her brother, Um Saad at the hand of her father, and Asya at the hand of her husband. Asya also witnesses the results of domestic violence while she was in training to be a nurse in University in Cairo. The nurse showing her and Chrissie around narrates: : This woman here: this is a boiling-water injury’- pulling : back the sheet- ‘worse you can see around the face and neck : than on the legs. Her husband threw the pan at her and he : aimed high. This one’ – pulling back the sheet - ‘kerosene. : Very severs.’ In a lower voice, ‘Set fire to herself. Very : common. A couple of cases every week. Young girls, mostly. : A fight with her family. Wants to marry her cousin or : whatever and they won’t let her so she rushes into the : kitchen, pours kerosene over herself and throws a lit match : on to her dress. (Soueif 85) : Chrissie herself also experiences physical abuse from her father on a regular basis. Early in the novel, she is beaten because her brother sees her walking in the street with a Palestinian colleague name Bassam. : Family is the cornerstone of every individual. Family plays a big part in the development and education of women. In Pillars of Salt, Maha’s mother, Maliha, passed away, but continues to be a source of stability for Maha. Maha has a very supportive father but an unsupportive brother. It is Daffash who is supposed to be taking care of his father in his old age but in reality it is Maha who takes care of their father and the farm. : What lay behind my father's misery was just one person, one : word, Daffash. He wanted a good son. A peasant capable of : digging his hands into the soil and transforming that piece : of land into a green orchard. Allah gave him a womanizer : and a city-worshipper… “My son is lured by the city lights. : He navigates by false stars. Look at Sheikh Talib's sons. : How they have kept their plough in the soil from sunrise to : sunset!” (Faqir 20) : In addition to taking on Daffash’s responsibilities in caring for the farm, Maha does the “womanly” tasks of cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes. Um Saad did not have the familial support that Maha had. Um Saad was unwanted and was told that on a regular basis. She was beaten and neglected as a child, and abused as an adult. Her parents married her off without even telling her. Her mother got her dressed up and her parents walked her to her new home. Only at the new home did she learn whose marriage it was. : : Family is very important in the novel Dreams of Trespass. The Mernissi family lives in a harem in Fez Morocco. This domestic harem is defined by the men’s desire to keep the women secluded and the desire not to break the family apart. Fatima lives with her mother and father, uncle, aunts, grandmother, and cousins. The women disagree about the necessity and logic of harems. There is one camp that sees it as necessary to a well functioning society, and the other camp sees harem life as wrongful imprisonment. : Asya in In the Eye of the Sun, struggles to get out from underneath the shadow of her parents. Wherever she goes people know her as the daughter of Lateefa Mursi and Mukhtar al-Ulama. Because of her parents’ positions at the university, Asya too is expected to follow in their footsteps. Asya’s friend Noora clashes within her family because she is in love with a Palestinian man names Bassam. Her family eventually cuts off contact with her. Non-Palestinian families do not want their daughters to marry Palestinian men because they are viewed as unstable. : : Arab communities support the Palestinians in their cause, but at the same time reject them because of the perceived instability. This situation is described best in the novel A Balcony over Fakihani by Liyana Badr. The first two novellas of this book outline the lives of two Palestinian women, Ysra and Suad. Ysra’s story begins in the refugee camps of Southern Lebanon. Her father is killed by a shell while she is fetching water for the family. Later, her brother is murdered as they fled a refugee camp. Her husband, a resistance fighter from the West Bank, is killed in an Isreali air raid on South Lebanon. Suad lives with her husband and children in the Fakihani district of Beirut. Her husband Umar survived a near fatal illness but is killed in a bomb blast that destroyes their home. Their lives are a far cry from the lives of Nadia and Asya. The conflicts that you hear about in passing in the other novels are front in center in the live of Yrsa and Suad. Nadia notes the attitudes of the Palestinians in Barqais: : 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’re all, apparently, the : daughters of families with influence, descended from the : cream of society. It makes you wonder if those far-off : homelands ever had and farmers in the, or servants, or : laborers, or small merchants maybe” (Al-Atrash 12). : Ysra tells of the daily realities of the Palestinians that have remained close to their homeland and are directly involved with the struggle, “Shells often bounced into the middle of groups of people, and the only ones who survived were those protected by fate” (Badr 11). : Maha has a connection to another resistance cause. Her husband Harb, is a resistance fighter against the British in Jordan. Although she is not on the front lines, her life is still affected. Throughout her marriage, her husband is often way doing battle with the enemy. Harb is killed in an air raid and Maha is left to raise their son on her own. Harbs death starts a chain of events that will eventually lead to her imprisonment in a mental institution. After Harb’s death, Maha went to live with her father. A fight ensued between her and her brother Daffash over ownership of the farm. Maha was committed by her brother as a way of gaining control of the family farm. Um Saad was committed by her husband after her mental stability was pushed to the breaking point because he took a second wife. In the institution, both women are far away from their homes and are being denied their life's passion; raising their children. Even before Um Saad was committed to the mental institution she was held captive. Both as a child and as an adult she was not allowed to venture outside her home. Even as an adult, when sitting on the veranda of her own home surrounded by trees and vines, her husband made her wear a veil. This is similar to the women in the city harem in Dreams of Trespass. The city harem, where Fatima lived, had high walls and gates. The harem where her maternal grandmother lived had no walls, no gates, and no guards. In the country harem, the frontiers are mental. : A woman’s own mentality can be her biggest barrier. Women take very seriously their role as Muslim women. They chose to do things out of duty rather than love or because they enjoy them. When asked if she ever loved her husband, Um Saad responded that she coexisted with him. Because she felt it was her duty to be a good wife regardless of love, she repressed her own feelings and desires. : I loved the scent of honeysuckle, but I tried hard to get : used to the smell of black iris. The stink of guts used to : turn my stomach upside down. I tamed my stomach, trained my : stomach even to like the stink. When Abu Saad slept with : me, I kept my mouth shut. I had a husband, children, and : grandchildren. I go used to the lack of conversation : between us. We just coexisted" (Faqir 159). : Some women sought material goods to fill the void left by an unhappy marriage or general discontent with their lives. Nadia describes such women that she encounters at dinner parties, “They flaunt their soft silks and their perfumes from Paris, but it can’t hide the ugliness of those tongues, tearing into guests who’ve just left or the people who haven’t come” (Al-Atrash 12). : Sometimes it is the reflection on choices and decisions that cause angst and discontent. Nadia often reflects on her decision to marry Ihsan. She feels that she would have been much happier if she had married Jalal. “I couldn’t wait for Jalal… I was a girl looking for marriage and love together, and Ihsan was ready to give me both. And so I agreed” (Al-Atrash 41). Asya is equally concerned with her own actions and decisions. After her extra marital affair, Asya waits for the guilt to take over “but there is nothing: she surprises herself by how well and how peacefully she has slept. By how wide awake and full of energy she immediately feels” (Soueif 540). Both women lacked the willingness to stand up for themselves. After making defiant statements, or resolving to do what they wanted, Asya and Nadia almost instantaneously feel guilty for resisting and go along with their husband’s plan. Asya even goes so far as to apologize for having opinions different from her husband. : What is truly remarkable about all of these women, is how they overcome the barriers surrounding them, and no matter how small the victory, refuse to be just another victim. In Pillars of Salt, Maha is faced with an irresponsible brother, infertility, the death of her husband, and the loss of her land. Maha, handles both the affairs of the farm as well as taking care of her father in old age. Despite difficulty, Maha and her husband Harb do conceive. Even after the death of her husband and the loss of her land, Maha still has the vigor to defend what’s hers, even if the odds are against her. Maha took the opportunity to speak her mind to Daffash and to the community as a whole. "First, I don't talk to rapists… Second, I don't talk to disobedient sons. Third, I don't talk to servants of the English… I will get married to nobody, I will not sign any deeds, and I will never cook for the English" (Faqir 217). Um Saad’s victory is unassuming in nature, but no less important. Despite her efforts to be the perfect wife, Um Saad is locked away in a mental institution. Her freedom comes in the form of a friend. All her life she had been neglected, mistreated, and disrespected, and there in the mental institution, she gained an ally in her struggle. Someone who cared about her and could sympathize with her. For once she had gained solidarity with another woman. : : In A Woman of Five Seasons Nadia’s transformation begins with her revalation about her first love Jalal. She founf the strength to fight for herself, "I don't know when and how I lifted my palm and slapped him. The giant in my depths was surging furiously out, with boundless strength- my inner being forked in my limbs, turned to a giant liberating itself from the corridors of fear and weakness" (Al-Atrash 107). She proclaims, "I'm not their woman. Not anyone's woman! ... I – Nadia al-Faqih—no one will be able to know or possess her. From this moment on I possess myself" (Al-Atrash 108). Her transformation gets a boost when she meets Jessica. Jessica is the manager of the London office of Ihsan’s company. Nadia sees Jessica as a successful happy independent woman and she (Nadia) aspires to be like that. She wants to own her own real estate business, read more books, and explore the arts. In her fifth season “The Heaveny Bodies Break from Their Spheres.” Ihsan’s business deals break down, his finances are left in ruins, and he is disgraced in Barqais. On the contrary, Nadia has made quite a life for herself. Nadia becomes the one with the power in the relationship. Even after she learns of Ihsan’s affair she refuses to publicize it, but not for Ihsan’s sake, “but to preserve my dignity and your image in front of the children” (Al-Atrash 168). : Fatima, in Dreams of Trespass, begins to understand the intricacies of male/female relationships and the meaning of being in a harem. The older women in the harem have hope that their daughters will not end up in a harem like they did. The younger girls are allowed a privilege that the older women did not get: The privilege of going to a western system school with the boys. It is Fatima’s mother who fights to get her into the new school. In the western style school she will learn math, science, and other subjects that will help her build a life for herself. Although the older women were denied the chance to learn to read, they found peace in smaller victories. Fatima’s mother sometimes skipped meals “altogether, especially when she wanted to annoy father, because to skip a meal was considered terribly rude and too openly individualistic” (Mernissi 76). The older women retained control of their traditional beauty treatments refusing to use imported manufactured products. Embroidery and Chama’s plays also created an escape for the women and a chance to express themselves. : Asya struggles to find herself and to find fulfillment. Sexually, she finds fulfillment in Gerald. Initially, she thinks her attraction to him is love, but soon realizes that it is merely physical. She gets the attention and satisfaction from Gerald that she could not get from Saif. “...there is no more pain but intimations of pleasure...” (Soueif 542). Even though she cheats on Saif, she comes to the conclusion that she does love him and that he does love her. They end up getting a divorce, but in her description of her perfect man, she includes many things that were true of Saif. Asya finishes her PhD and satisfies her required tenure at the university. She then works for a publishing company in London. : From these women’s stories, we can see that Arab culture designed so that women are not supposed to be individuals. Women are not supposed to have identities separate from that of their family. "I wanted to slip into another identity. Can you cast off your identity like diry underwear? Can you?' 'Identity? What is identity? I think I have none.' 'Maha, poor Maha" (Faqir 80). Women are the glue of the family unit. Ihsan's mother kept the family out of poverty by selling her jewelry. Maha's mother Maliha was the rock that she and her father depended on even in death. The women of the harem were the backbone of the family and kept the household running smoothly. Tradition teaches individuality as the detriment of the family unit. But these stories show us that individuality is the strength of family units. Each woman sought to exercise their freedom, to explore their individuality, and to command respect. In short, each woman seeks happiness. Fatima’s mother wisely points out that this happiness need not be separate from family and loved ones, and that in fact individuality thrives on the love and involvement of family: : Happiness… was when a person felt good, light, creative, : content, loving and loved, and free. An unhappy person felt : as if there were barriers crushing her desires and the : talents she had inside. A happy woman was one who could : exercise all kinds of rights, from the right to move to the : right to create, compete, and challenge, and at the same : time could feel loved for doing so… Happiness was to be : with loved ones, and yet still feel that you existed as a : separate being, that you were not there just to make them : happy. (Mernissi 80)

Optional Link URL:
Title of Link:
Optional Image URL: