[ Followups | Post Followup | Open Discussion | Help ]

The Phases of a Woman's Life

Posted by Licia Contu on May 9, 2008 at 16:33:18:

Five female writers; five different works; and one main unifying character: the contemporary Arab-Muslim world.
Pillars of Salt by Fadia Faqir, A Woman of Five Seasons by Leila Al-Atrash, A Balcony over the Fakihani by Liyana Badr, Dreams of Trespass by Fatima Mernissi, and In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif, are novels whose common background is the history of the Arab world in the twentieth century.
In this essay, I will analyze the role played by women in these novels in illustrating examples of specific phases of their lives. Not to mention how the political is strongly linked to the personal. These women’s accounts of a life lived in its different chronological phases and social roles still carry the weight of the political situations and social realities.
All of our protagonists are in a way involved in the historical events that took place whether in the Middle-East, Egypt or Morocco. Many of them are interested in politics, some are even active from that point of view, and others are directly victims of war. The complicated political context becomes a fundamental character that will affect their thoughts, their decisions, sometimes their families, sometimes their whole lives. Therefore, I will illustrate, the different steps in the development of the female protagonist while keeping a close attention to the political background that shaped their fate.
The figure of the woman, both in Western and Eastern societies, has always been related to her role within her family. During her life, she passes through several phases: a woman is first a daughter and a sister, then becomes a wife and a mother, and even though this kind of succession of roles can also be applied to men, it is usually perceived in a stronger way with women, especially according to the Arab-Muslim culture. A woman is defined above all through the different role she has to play at every phase of her existence.
In Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt the protagonists are two women, raised in very different contexts and which make them representative of very different backgrounds. On one hand, Maha is a peasant girl, she is from a Bedouin community living in a small village near the Dead Sea, and on the other hand, stands the figure of Umm Saad who divides her life between two cities: Damascus, where she is born, and Amman, where she moves to when she is still a child. Maha has a happy childhood with loving parents, while Umm Saad is used to being always afraid of her father: “My father was a rebel against the French in Syria. He must have frightened the French because he used to frighten me. He would keep shouting and pacing the small room until I swam in a pond of fear under the blanket. He would keep talking about killing and blood, about explosives and corpses until my blood would freeze in my veins.” At the beginning, Umm Saad enjoys her new life in Amman, a city which, in her opinion, is more active than Damascus. She goes to school, and starts learning the chapters of the Qu’ran , but a year later, her father orders her to stay at home because she is becoming a woman. Maha grows up to be a very independent woman, and after her mother’s death she begins to take care of the family’s farm although she is a woman and women are not usually asked to undertake such kinds of work. Her brother, Daffash, the one who is supposed to manage the farm, is more attracted by the city and Western customs than by his own property, this is why she is left alone to take care of that land. From our protagonists’ first phase of “daughter and sister”, we can start to delineate the different paths they will take towards the same destiny.
The second phase is one of the most important ones for Muslim women. Finding a man to marry becomes a fundamental issue for a girl and her family. In the case of Maha, we have a love marriage, her husband Harb considers her “the twin of his soul,” and she is deeply in love with him. A very considerable aspect of Maha’s marriage is that her father asks for her approval before accepting the proposal presented on behalf of Harb by the village delegation. The complicity between the two lovers appears evident during their first night together. At a time when the entire community insists on having proof of Maha’s virginity, the young bride suggests to her husband who doesn’t want to hurt her, that she can prick her finger in order to offer them the blood stain they expect. As a stark contrast to this tender relationship of understanding and complicity, there is the sad story of Umm Saad’s forced marriage. After refusing the man she is in love with because of his Circassian ethnicity, her parents pretend to take her to a wedding party, then reveal to her at the very last moment that she is the bride and is going to marry an older man that she doesn’t know and has never met.
The first occasion of sexual intercourse for these two couples could not have been more different. The girls are both adolescents when they get married, but once again, Maha’s experience is characterized by love and tenderness, “It was nearly dawn[…] and I realized I was in Harb’s arms.[…] He kissed the left side of my mouth, the right side, then the center of my trembling lips.[….] ‘My heart starts stamping and jumping in the air when I see you’ he said” while Umm Saad’s wedding night is violent and brutal : “I will never forget one thing. At night, the man, my husband, who afterwards I discovered was called Abu Saad, chased me and ripped my dress apart.[….] He patted my hairless stomach with his cold fingers, forced my legs open, then penetrated my discarded body. O bride, candles around us, sang the women outside.[….] O bride you are a carnation.” Maha’s devotion to Harb remains unchanged even after his death. We witness her loyalty first when, during Samir Pasha’s party, she rebels against the British commander because she considers him responsible for her husband’s death: “ ‘You killed my husband’[…] I collected as much saliva as I could and spat on the surprised face of the English officer.” Then her loyalty to her husband’s memory is proven again when she refuses to marry another man, even though it was commonly accepted that a widow could marry again, “I vowed never to get married again. My soul is still married to Harb.” Umm Saad’s marriage is nothing but the daily routine that leads her through the years, towards the moment her husband decides to marry another woman. That is the point of no return for Umm Saad, who has always been a good and obedient wife, although she has never loved her husband. The new, young and beautiful wife who takes Umm Saad’s room, her place beside her husband, her whole life, is no more than another injustice in her wedding life. “I said to the man I had been calling my husband, ‘How dare you bring another woman to my house?’ I said, ‘How dare you do this to me?’ He ignored me. He had no eyes for me.” For the very first time she rebels. She tries to affirm her opinion as she had never done before in her life, but her attempt is promptly snuffed out by violence: “Abu Saad came in to the kitchen and asked, ‘What’s for breakfast?’ When he asked me about breakfast, an invisible cord in my head snapped and I started slapping my face, wailing and kicking his fat legs. “Stop it, stop it.’ I refused to stop. I could not stop, even if I had wanted to. He smashed one of the chairs, picked up the legs, then broke them one after the other on my sides.”
Once a woman gets married, childbearing usually becomes the most important of her thoughts. If for some reason she doesn’t get pregnant within one or two months after the wedding, the community around her begins to become suspicious. Relatives start asking questions and pushing the young bride in order to find a “solution.” It’s interesting to notice that in most cases, society blames the absence of the maternity exclusively on the woman, as if the husband played a marginal role, or was not involved at all. After some months of marriage, Maha begins to worry: “My body did not respond to the hot water of Harb. Flesh did not respond. Oh, how I hated the sight of my menstrual blood sticking out its tongue to me every twenty-eight days. Aunt Tamam used to puff some smoke filling the room with suffocating trails and ask, ‘Is the barrel still empty?’ Yes, Tamam, the barrel was empty. Yes, Maha’s belly was as small as ever, her breasts were as limp as ever, and her period visited her regularly.” Maha’s presumed sterility becomes very quickly a concern for the entire village, “Just five months without pregnancy and the people of Hamia started adding, ‘May Allah give you a son,’ after every greeting.” So her mother-in law convinces her to ask for help in order to purify her “polluted belly.” Maha’s desire and need for a pregnancy leads her to experience a series of very tough treatments, combination of magic and popular beliefs, which will cause serious damages to her health. Finally she reaches her goal, but she discovers her pregnancy right after learning that her husband has been killed during a battle. From that moment on the baby she carries becomes the symbol of her never ending connection to Harb, “the twin of her soul”, but also her only reason for living. Mubarak, Maha’s son, becomes her first thought. She wants to protect him because he is her only insurance for the future, she knows that, once grown up, he will protect and take care of her and maybe rescue the honor of his family by revenge: “Must breastfeed my suckling. The soft tissues around his fingers would disappear, his eyes would dry up, and the gap in his skull would close. Mubarak would grow up, would become a strong man. Would he protect me from his uncle? Would he break the hand which killed his father Harb and slapped his mother?”(171)
Umm Saad gives her husband eight sons. One could think that through her maternity she will finally achieve if not happiness, at least a sense of quiet in her life after the several injustices she has had to suffer. Unfortunately, not even the third phase of her existence will bring her the rescue she needs and deserves. Her sons consider her exactly in the same way their father does. She is a woman, she is responsible for housekeeping and feeding them, but, she has no feelings and even if she does, she has no right to express them as long as they could disturb the men’s life. The children’s attitude towards their mother appears clearly when Umm Saad finds out that her husband has married another woman without even telling her in advance. She feels betrayed, lonely and once again victim of injustice and as every woman would do, she calls for help from her first child: “I went to my son Walid and cried on his shoulder. He said, ‘I’m glad you know. The whole of Amman knows.’” Her son knows, but he will not do anything to defend his mother. Why? Because he thinks that there is no reason to defend her. A woman is not supposed to complain or rebel if her husband after many years of marriage decides to take another wife. These are the rules of the male-dominated society and Umm Saad’ sons will not go against them in order to safeguard their mother’s dignity. Would it be different if she had a daughter? She could at least share her torments and benefit from another woman’s solidarity as she will do with Maha later but at that time it was too late since the two women were imprisoned in a mental hospital.
If in Pillars of Salt the protagonists’ lives undergo a progressive degeneration which will lead them to share the same destiny in the mental hospital, in A Woman of Five Seasons by Leila Al-Atrash we assist to the inverse process. It’s a story of gradual growth and personality’s strengthening. The book focuses on the second phase of its protagonist’s lifetime. There are only a few references to her life as a daughter before getting married and moving to Barqais, and we know that she has three children but we never see her related to them. The author introduces her main character, Nadia, through the relationship with her husband Ihsan, a Palestinian man who decides to move from Damascus, where he lived as a refugee, to the rich state of Barqais in search of wealth. At the beginning of the book Nadia is a dominted woman, she uses to do whatever her husband wants her to do. Ihsan’s first priority is money and even his wife is a way to fulfill his hunger of richness. She is beautiful, she is his “lovely kitten” and will be the mirror of his growing economical wellness in front of other people: “Tomorrow, he thought, will Nadia be able to stand out? Make other woman say how elegant she is? Will she know how to use her fingers and neck, to make the diamonds shine on them? And if she does? Then, Ihsan, those women will talk about your wife to their husbands and the men will talk about you! Barqais will come to know just what Ihsan Natour’s worth!”(5). Nadia is just a wonderful statue to be proud of and to adorn with as many decorations as possible in order to arouse admiration and envy at the same time. It doesn’t matter if this is not the kind of treatment she would expect from her husband: “It made her feel ill when he called her ‘his kitten,’ but nothing would stop him from doing it. It hurt her, too, that he could never see her as anything but his woman. She didn’t understand. Hadn’t occur to him, just once, that she might have feelings beyond the ones he wanted from her?”(13) Nadia hates going to those parties where appearance is everything and all women try to impress the others with their expensive dresses and shining jewelry. She does not want to be involved in her husband’s “games”, she does not care about being considered beautiful, rich and lucky, she would prefer to have a real life rather than a fake one although this one could be more pleasant and comfortable. But she does not refuse. She is not able to say “no” to her husband, because she knows that an obedient wife in not supposed to do so and she bears up. “Does he ever think of what happens to me now? 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 doesn’t know the meaning of female and male, who rises above anything Ihsan ever thinks about. It burns me with its whip whenever Ihsan enjoys arousing the female in me. But it’s a suffering too, weak and suppressed, powerless to rise to resistance and refusal, when Ihsan treats me as his toy, then goes happily off to sleep.”(34/35)
Nadia would like to be an educated person, but that bothers Ihsan who does not understand the necessity of pursuing something that is not in the interest of procuring and providing wealth, richness and social recognition. Although they have agreed before the marriage that she would continue to attend university in order to get her degree, after a few months he started pushing her to have a child in order to prevent her from finishing her education. Ihsan does not want to have control on his wife’s ordinary life only, he needs to dominate her mind, and this can happen if she is not a more educated person than he is. Since the first day of their marriage she has been nothing but his perfect doll, but after ten years she starts to rebel, gaining day after day her independence.
Gradually she stops to be “the daughter of that Arab woman who repeated her mother’s advice on her wedding night: ‘Fall in with everything he commands’,” and she begins to be always more aware and self-confident. First she wants to reach her economical independence, so for example, when her husband asks her if she prefers to keep the gold he has bought for her or if she would like him to sell it and buy her land in the place of it she answers: “Both, Ihsan. The two together won’t come to ten percent. That still leaves you nine tenths of the total. As of now, and until you’ve done it for me, we sleep in separate bedrooms.” Then she realizes that she will not need a man any more and that happens when she discovers that Jalal, Ihsan’s brother, the man she has always been in love with and the person that she thought would understand her, is nothing but a man like every other who is ready to treat her as his own property and his “sex toy”: “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 a female and he is a man. I, Nadia Al-Faqih, no one will be able to know or possess her. From this moment on I possess myself. They will se a face unknown to them.” The woman who only a few months before would not dare to refuse one of her husband’s orders, now is able to start her own business by opening a real estate office in London.
The process which leads Nadia to her complete liberation from Ihsan’s control reaches its most striking point when, towards the end of the book, she manages to rescue her husband’s dignity. He was victim of a trap set for him by one of his rivals in order to force him to conduct an illegal business: “He threatened to publish certain documents and photographs no one would want to see the light of day […] I had to buy his silence. Not for your sake, Ihsan, but to preserve my dignity and your image in front of the children.” It is this point that culminates in the progressive personal development of Nadia.
Maha, Umm Saad, and Nadia’ s stories, as we have seen, have been in some ways marked by the war. Harb, Maha’s husband, is killed during a battle against the British army; Umm Saad’s father has been a rebel during the French occupation in Syria, and Ihsan, Nadia’s husband, as a Palestinian, is a victim of the numerous wars connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, no one of our protagonists has been directly involved in the war. In A Balcony over the Fakihani by Liyana Badr, we meet other two ladies, Yusra and Su’ad, whose life is totally surrounded by politics and the horror of the war. The writer introduces Yusra in the first novella, A Land of Rock and Thyme, when she is still very young. Her family is Palestinian and, like many other families, they are forced to an eternal exile since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Yusra lives with her parents and eight brothers and sisters in the refugee camp of Tal Al-Zatar, in Lebanon. We meet her when she still is in the first phase of her life: she is a daughter and a sister. Through Yusra’s story, we can see how the war is able to modify this kind of relationship.
War is a phenomenon that leads to an unavoidable destabilization. First of all “death becomes familiar” (11), so everyone is prepared to lose a member of the family very easily, then war changes the priorities’ list. It appears clearly when Yusra’s father dies: she and her sister had gone fetch the water for the family, as they were used to, when their father was severely wounded. His condition appeared very serious, but he didn’t want his daughters to come back without water, so he didn’t call them back: “I received the shocking news: Father had been wounded soon after we left and had lived on for another four 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.’”(10) No one would expect a dying father not to call his daughter to see him for the last time, but when there is war, things change. Water, which is a hope for life, is more important than a father’s death. Another example of the turnover, produced by war, regarding family relationships is Jamal’s death. During the general escape after the attack of Tal Al-Zatar, Jamal, the fifteen years old brother of Yusra answers a soldier who was questioning him “[I’m] Palestinian.”(14) The man immediately shoots at him. His mother and his sisters see him falling and dying, but they can’t stop: “We passed by him, he had gone ahead of us because he was impatient. I just glanced at him, receiving such a shock my feet could no longer move forward or hold up my body. My nerves shattered, but I couldn’t stop or lean over him and touch him with my hand. If any of us were to stop by someone who had been killed, they would pick up us out and finish us off at once. I couldn’t. We moved on, right past him.”(14-15) The necessity of survival counts more than the normal instinct of a sister who sees her killed brother laying on the ground.
Yusra’s life follows the model of Maha’s in “Pillars of Salt” both in her second and third phases, that is in her role as a wife and then as mother. Her husband Ahmed is Palestinian as well and they married out of love but then he died quickly after the marriage. Like Maha, Yusra also discovers her pregnancy after her husband’s death, and wants to keep his memory alive so refuses to forget about him when pressured by other women. Her relationship to her son also reflects the same pattern observed in Pillars of Salt since Maha too considers her son to be an instrument of revenge hoping that he will one day fight against the British who killed his father and avenge his mother and protect her from his uncle who mistreated her. The presence of a man on the head of the family is very important in dealing with society, since he is the figure that protects that family. Therefore, the birth of a male child represents the continuation of the father image and is the hope for the lonely widowed mother of renewed protection and security: “Quickly decisively, she considered the matter. Three months in the womb. Six more to complete the pregnancy. Another person will be born. It would be a Palestinian, from its first moment in the world.” (25) From this quotation we can see the role played by the son has also in this case an additional nationalistic value: he will replace for her, the father that she lost, the husband that was killed, the security that she missed in society but, above all, he also serves as an embodiment of a disappearing identity.
In the second novella Su’ad marries a Tunisian man who joined the Palestinian resistance. But her marriage was not conventional because she left with Umar, before they get officially married which is a defying act of rebellion against her father’s wish.
Once married they lived first in Beirut then in the Shatila refugees camp. During their stay in Beirut, Su’ad got pregnant but because of the bad conditions in which they were living, she lost her baby. The description of losing the baby is expressed only in few sentences, not because it does not deserve attention or because it does not play an important role in a life of a woman, but because in this novella, the emphasis was more on the inhumane conditions that lead to this miscarriage: “I do have a vivid memory of coming home with the feeling of defeat, carrying a long prescription for drugs and vitamins. It wasn’t just a matter of losing the baby, it was anemia too and I was told I needed fresh air” (43). Su’ad marriage faced another big challenge when Umar fell seriously sick and was sent to Europe to be treated. There he fell in love with his treating doctor and they had an affair but after the treatment was completed he returned to his wife. Despite The fact the he loved his wife, he could not resist the love story with the European doctor because the relationship had a connotation and the realization of a dream and worked as an escape from reality, both from the personal point of view and the national political dimension. The novella ends with the husband’s death. It is interesting to remark how, possibly in an ironic bitter turn of fate, the caring loving husbands throughout these novels end up being dead and leaving wives and children behind them.
The setting of “Dreams of Trespass” by Fatima Marnissi takes place in Morocco and thus diverges from the main recurrent personal and political themes that we encountered in the novels, mostly dealing with the Middle East. Still, other themes remain the same and the difference in reality conveyed in this novel help to appreciate the plurality of experiences. “Dreams of Trespass” records the life of a girl born and raised inside a Harem. Two types of harem are contrasted: the country Harem where Fatima’s grandmother lives represents another concept of family. The man and all his co-wives help each other and live in a community. Whereas the urban type of Harem where Fatima lives presents a different structure: A grandmother, her two sons who are the masters of the Harem each has one wife. The concept of a harem here is on a smaller level, but both work as a prison for women. We cannot talk about the three phases in Fatima’s life since she remains a child throughout the novel but her parent’s relationship is interesting to analyze. Her mother seeks to separate herself from the Harem’s life but what bothers her most is the interference in her personal matters from all the members of the family. This is opposite to her own mother’s way of life in the rural harem where she shares her husband, place an existence with co-wives. This is the reason why she is constantly fighting with her husband over her independence, the husband although he tries to make his wife happy, does not have enough courage to leave the Harem and live on his own.
It is interesting to note Fatima’s perception as a child of the tension between the modern and the old-fashioned in her own family. The child could not escape the complex reality of her time torn between the two tendencies. Modernity is represented by her mother, on one side, who is aware of her own individuality and fights for her independence; and on the other side, conservatism is represented by her paternal grandmother who is still very attached to old-fashioned traditions and formalities of conduct. At this stage, we cannot anticipate and foreshadow the later development of this Fatima, but we can nevertheless draw some conjectures about her future. Will she take advantage of being exposed to the contrast between modernity and conservatism? Where would all this lead her to?
A similar questioning can be asked while encountering Asya, the main character of the novel entitled “In the Eye of the Sun”. She is a strong representative of all the three phases in the development of a woman’s life. First we meet her as a daughter of two professors teaching at Cairo’s university. Coming from an educated family, the setting is an intellectual one and the personal psychological and physical understanding of her character is one of the major themes in the novel. Asya is a free woman because her parents gave her both the freedom of choice and action. Unlike her friend Chrissie and all the main characters of the other novels who suffered of a certain type of social pressure, Asya’s problem is with herself. The body becomes the map on which indirect social codes are written and her struggle with herself reflects on the power of these forces and the impossibility of evading them in intimacy. If on the surface she acts as a modern woman with no traditional obligations and expectation, on a more personal level, she suffers from other issues that find expression mainly in her physical relationship with her husband. Her parents wanted to give her above all a free and cultivated way of life and therefore insisted on her education thinking that it was the tool that will empower her. Asya’s role as a wife is the guiding line throughout the book but it follows three stages of development, before marriage, after marriage and with the lover. Before her marriage Asya looked for breaking the rule and wanted to have sex with her fiancé who refused. But, on the first night of their marriage, when her now husband Saif tried to approach her, she couldn’t share with him the same expectations. Would she have had the same physical pain if she had made love to Saif before the marriage? The paradox is that even if she claimed to love and want to consume her marriage, every time her husband touched her, she would feel the same pain that would prevent her from fulfilling her desires. Saif’s reaction is noteworthy, he did not force his wife to have sex with him by claiming his right to; on the contrary, he accepted the lack of any physical relationship between them for years: “OK, Princess’ he’d said. ‘Let’s just leave it. I love you. I love you well enough to live with you like a sister” (302). Her feelings became mixed towards her husband. On one hand, she hated him because she considered him responsible for what was happening, that is because he no longer insisted on having sex with her, on the other hand, she needed his presence next to her as we can see when she went to Britain to obtain her PhD, it took her only a few months to ask for him to join her. He did join her and to do that he had to renounce a very good job he had with the United Nations. Although all her family appreciated this gesture and demonstration of love, Asya found in it a way to justify it for other reasons. She convinced herself that her husband joined her because he didn’t really like the job he was doing and he had the possibility of getting his PhD in Britain, he did not go there only to support her. Asya does reach her sexual fulfillment with a man, but it is another man not her husband. She was the one who started the relationship of adultery and asked for it. “It is so pleasant, he says looking into his coffee cup so deeply peaceful: spending the day with you. Would you like, says Asya watching him, to spend the night?” (539). How can a body reacts differently in two situations? Is it, one may ask, related to the cultural setting in which the love making takes place and to the different culture to which the lover belongs? It seems as if Asya, wanted to share a normal life with her husband but the fact that they both share the same culture had a more complex meaning and caused Asya’s aversion to sex as a rejection of that culture in general. Her sexuality became the mirror of complex and distant forms of oppression and prejudice that indirectly affected her even on the level of the unconscious. With her lover, Asya finds sexual fulfillment but she doesn’t have the same feelings she has for Saif. She quickly realizes that the relationship with Gerald does not procure her the emotional satisfaction she wants. “When I watch Saif walk away from me, I feel bereft lost- even if I had been miserable while I was with him. I am always waiting for him to come back. When I watch G. walk away I feel relieved. Not at first: at first when he walked away I used to feel expectant; expectant of his return. But for the last three months when he’s gone away, I felt relief with a bit of almost theoretical sadness at the edge” (591). When Saif knew about his wife’s affair he lost his mind. “Five years he says, five years. The pain is too much for you to take, you feel sick if I so much put my hand on your tits, you sneeze if I come near you. Then you go and open your legs to some fucking stranger” (623). The marriage is compromised for ever. Even if Asya will get rid of her lover, Saif will never forgive her. it is noteworthy to analyse the episode of Asya’s miscarriage. At first, it looks like a similar case to Su’ad’s but here the roles are reversed. Su’ad wanted to have a baby and considered her pregnancy to be a blessing on personal and social levels, while Asya, who is not facing the same hard conditions and social pressures, is against the idea of giving birth at this moment of her life. Again we see the double attitude of Asya this time towards her baby. Apparently, she doesn’t want that pregnancy but after loosing the baby she feels guilty and lonelier. Even after some years, she rethinks about that miscarriage dreaming of what her life would have been if she hadn’t lost the baby. She even turned her disappointment towards her husband and thought he was accusing her of not only wanting to lose the baby but actually helping the miscarriage happen. At the moment of separation Saif says “Why didn’t you die? Why didn’t you die instead of killing the baby?” (631). Asya’s life was marked by love, she was loved by her family, by her husband, by her friends and even by her lover, but what she wanted more is the escape from herself and her identity as a woman with specific roles to play. Everything she did or did not was marked by contradiction, a contradiction that is at the heart of the situation of the woman herself in a difficult society. During all the phases of her life, she refused to fit in the specific category that her society expected from her. Even though her family provided her with the possibility of an escape she still struggled with her sexuality and cultural heritage. Although Asya’ fulfilled her sexual development after years and years of frustration, she did not have the complete experience of the women in the other novels since her role was only related to her resistance to becoming a woman.
In these texts different versions of being a woman were presented. Every woman defined herself in a distinct role that gave her a sense of identity. For some of them, this role was imposed; for others, it was the result of a free choice and a proof of love. No matter what the conditions were, every woman in these novels suffered and struggled either with the self, the family, the society or a state conflict. The family is always present in the preoccupations of these women because it is the stepping stone for their entry into society.

Followups

Post a Followup

Name:
Email:

Subject:

Comments:
: Five female writers; five different works; and one main unifying character: the contemporary Arab-Muslim world. : Pillars of Salt by Fadia Faqir, A Woman of Five Seasons by Leila Al-Atrash, A Balcony over the Fakihani by Liyana Badr, Dreams of Trespass by Fatima Mernissi, and In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif, are novels whose common background is the history of the Arab world in the twentieth century. : In this essay, I will analyze the role played by women in these novels in illustrating examples of specific phases of their lives. Not to mention how the political is strongly linked to the personal. These women’s accounts of a life lived in its different chronological phases and social roles still carry the weight of the political situations and social realities. : All of our protagonists are in a way involved in the historical events that took place whether in the Middle-East, Egypt or Morocco. Many of them are interested in politics, some are even active from that point of view, and others are directly victims of war. The complicated political context becomes a fundamental character that will affect their thoughts, their decisions, sometimes their families, sometimes their whole lives. Therefore, I will illustrate, the different steps in the development of the female protagonist while keeping a close attention to the political background that shaped their fate. : The figure of the woman, both in Western and Eastern societies, has always been related to her role within her family. During her life, she passes through several phases: a woman is first a daughter and a sister, then becomes a wife and a mother, and even though this kind of succession of roles can also be applied to men, it is usually perceived in a stronger way with women, especially according to the Arab-Muslim culture. A woman is defined above all through the different role she has to play at every phase of her existence. : In Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt the protagonists are two women, raised in very different contexts and which make them representative of very different backgrounds. On one hand, Maha is a peasant girl, she is from a Bedouin community living in a small village near the Dead Sea, and on the other hand, stands the figure of Umm Saad who divides her life between two cities: Damascus, where she is born, and Amman, where she moves to when she is still a child. Maha has a happy childhood with loving parents, while Umm Saad is used to being always afraid of her father: “My father was a rebel against the French in Syria. He must have frightened the French because he used to frighten me. He would keep shouting and pacing the small room until I swam in a pond of fear under the blanket. He would keep talking about killing and blood, about explosives and corpses until my blood would freeze in my veins.” At the beginning, Umm Saad enjoys her new life in Amman, a city which, in her opinion, is more active than Damascus. She goes to school, and starts learning the chapters of the Qu’ran , but a year later, her father orders her to stay at home because she is becoming a woman. Maha grows up to be a very independent woman, and after her mother’s death she begins to take care of the family’s farm although she is a woman and women are not usually asked to undertake such kinds of work. Her brother, Daffash, the one who is supposed to manage the farm, is more attracted by the city and Western customs than by his own property, this is why she is left alone to take care of that land. From our protagonists’ first phase of “daughter and sister”, we can start to delineate the different paths they will take towards the same destiny. : The second phase is one of the most important ones for Muslim women. Finding a man to marry becomes a fundamental issue for a girl and her family. In the case of Maha, we have a love marriage, her husband Harb considers her “the twin of his soul,” and she is deeply in love with him. A very considerable aspect of Maha’s marriage is that her father asks for her approval before accepting the proposal presented on behalf of Harb by the village delegation. The complicity between the two lovers appears evident during their first night together. At a time when the entire community insists on having proof of Maha’s virginity, the young bride suggests to her husband who doesn’t want to hurt her, that she can prick her finger in order to offer them the blood stain they expect. As a stark contrast to this tender relationship of understanding and complicity, there is the sad story of Umm Saad’s forced marriage. After refusing the man she is in love with because of his Circassian ethnicity, her parents pretend to take her to a wedding party, then reveal to her at the very last moment that she is the bride and is going to marry an older man that she doesn’t know and has never met. : The first occasion of sexual intercourse for these two couples could not have been more different. The girls are both adolescents when they get married, but once again, Maha’s experience is characterized by love and tenderness, “It was nearly dawn[…] and I realized I was in Harb’s arms.[…] He kissed the left side of my mouth, the right side, then the center of my trembling lips.[….] ‘My heart starts stamping and jumping in the air when I see you’ he said” while Umm Saad’s wedding night is violent and brutal : “I will never forget one thing. At night, the man, my husband, who afterwards I discovered was called Abu Saad, chased me and ripped my dress apart.[….] He patted my hairless stomach with his cold fingers, forced my legs open, then penetrated my discarded body. O bride, candles around us, sang the women outside.[….] O bride you are a carnation.” Maha’s devotion to Harb remains unchanged even after his death. We witness her loyalty first when, during Samir Pasha’s party, she rebels against the British commander because she considers him responsible for her husband’s death: “ ‘You killed my husband’[…] I collected as much saliva as I could and spat on the surprised face of the English officer.” Then her loyalty to her husband’s memory is proven again when she refuses to marry another man, even though it was commonly accepted that a widow could marry again, “I vowed never to get married again. My soul is still married to Harb.” Umm Saad’s marriage is nothing but the daily routine that leads her through the years, towards the moment her husband decides to marry another woman. That is the point of no return for Umm Saad, who has always been a good and obedient wife, although she has never loved her husband. The new, young and beautiful wife who takes Umm Saad’s room, her place beside her husband, her whole life, is no more than another injustice in her wedding life. “I said to the man I had been calling my husband, ‘How dare you bring another woman to my house?’ I said, ‘How dare you do this to me?’ He ignored me. He had no eyes for me.” For the very first time she rebels. She tries to affirm her opinion as she had never done before in her life, but her attempt is promptly snuffed out by violence: “Abu Saad came in to the kitchen and asked, ‘What’s for breakfast?’ When he asked me about breakfast, an invisible cord in my head snapped and I started slapping my face, wailing and kicking his fat legs. “Stop it, stop it.’ I refused to stop. I could not stop, even if I had wanted to. He smashed one of the chairs, picked up the legs, then broke them one after the other on my sides.” : Once a woman gets married, childbearing usually becomes the most important of her thoughts. If for some reason she doesn’t get pregnant within one or two months after the wedding, the community around her begins to become suspicious. Relatives start asking questions and pushing the young bride in order to find a “solution.” It’s interesting to notice that in most cases, society blames the absence of the maternity exclusively on the woman, as if the husband played a marginal role, or was not involved at all. After some months of marriage, Maha begins to worry: “My body did not respond to the hot water of Harb. Flesh did not respond. Oh, how I hated the sight of my menstrual blood sticking out its tongue to me every twenty-eight days. Aunt Tamam used to puff some smoke filling the room with suffocating trails and ask, ‘Is the barrel still empty?’ Yes, Tamam, the barrel was empty. Yes, Maha’s belly was as small as ever, her breasts were as limp as ever, and her period visited her regularly.” Maha’s presumed sterility becomes very quickly a concern for the entire village, “Just five months without pregnancy and the people of Hamia started adding, ‘May Allah give you a son,’ after every greeting.” So her mother-in law convinces her to ask for help in order to purify her “polluted belly.” Maha’s desire and need for a pregnancy leads her to experience a series of very tough treatments, combination of magic and popular beliefs, which will cause serious damages to her health. Finally she reaches her goal, but she discovers her pregnancy right after learning that her husband has been killed during a battle. From that moment on the baby she carries becomes the symbol of her never ending connection to Harb, “the twin of her soul”, but also her only reason for living. Mubarak, Maha’s son, becomes her first thought. She wants to protect him because he is her only insurance for the future, she knows that, once grown up, he will protect and take care of her and maybe rescue the honor of his family by revenge: “Must breastfeed my suckling. The soft tissues around his fingers would disappear, his eyes would dry up, and the gap in his skull would close. Mubarak would grow up, would become a strong man. Would he protect me from his uncle? Would he break the hand which killed his father Harb and slapped his mother?”(171) : Umm Saad gives her husband eight sons. One could think that through her maternity she will finally achieve if not happiness, at least a sense of quiet in her life after the several injustices she has had to suffer. Unfortunately, not even the third phase of her existence will bring her the rescue she needs and deserves. Her sons consider her exactly in the same way their father does. She is a woman, she is responsible for housekeeping and feeding them, but, she has no feelings and even if she does, she has no right to express them as long as they could disturb the men’s life. The children’s attitude towards their mother appears clearly when Umm Saad finds out that her husband has married another woman without even telling her in advance. She feels betrayed, lonely and once again victim of injustice and as every woman would do, she calls for help from her first child: “I went to my son Walid and cried on his shoulder. He said, ‘I’m glad you know. The whole of Amman knows.’” Her son knows, but he will not do anything to defend his mother. Why? Because he thinks that there is no reason to defend her. A woman is not supposed to complain or rebel if her husband after many years of marriage decides to take another wife. These are the rules of the male-dominated society and Umm Saad’ sons will not go against them in order to safeguard their mother’s dignity. Would it be different if she had a daughter? She could at least share her torments and benefit from another woman’s solidarity as she will do with Maha later but at that time it was too late since the two women were imprisoned in a mental hospital. : If in Pillars of Salt the protagonists’ lives undergo a progressive degeneration which will lead them to share the same destiny in the mental hospital, in A Woman of Five Seasons by Leila Al-Atrash we assist to the inverse process. It’s a story of gradual growth and personality’s strengthening. The book focuses on the second phase of its protagonist’s lifetime. There are only a few references to her life as a daughter before getting married and moving to Barqais, and we know that she has three children but we never see her related to them. The author introduces her main character, Nadia, through the relationship with her husband Ihsan, a Palestinian man who decides to move from Damascus, where he lived as a refugee, to the rich state of Barqais in search of wealth. At the beginning of the book Nadia is a dominted woman, she uses to do whatever her husband wants her to do. Ihsan’s first priority is money and even his wife is a way to fulfill his hunger of richness. She is beautiful, she is his “lovely kitten” and will be the mirror of his growing economical wellness in front of other people: “Tomorrow, he thought, will Nadia be able to stand out? Make other woman say how elegant she is? Will she know how to use her fingers and neck, to make the diamonds shine on them? And if she does? Then, Ihsan, those women will talk about your wife to their husbands and the men will talk about you! Barqais will come to know just what Ihsan Natour’s worth!”(5). Nadia is just a wonderful statue to be proud of and to adorn with as many decorations as possible in order to arouse admiration and envy at the same time. It doesn’t matter if this is not the kind of treatment she would expect from her husband: “It made her feel ill when he called her ‘his kitten,’ but nothing would stop him from doing it. It hurt her, too, that he could never see her as anything but his woman. She didn’t understand. Hadn’t occur to him, just once, that she might have feelings beyond the ones he wanted from her?”(13) Nadia hates going to those parties where appearance is everything and all women try to impress the others with their expensive dresses and shining jewelry. She does not want to be involved in her husband’s “games”, she does not care about being considered beautiful, rich and lucky, she would prefer to have a real life rather than a fake one although this one could be more pleasant and comfortable. But she does not refuse. She is not able to say “no” to her husband, because she knows that an obedient wife in not supposed to do so and she bears up. “Does he ever think of what happens to me now? 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 doesn’t know the meaning of female and male, who rises above anything Ihsan ever thinks about. It burns me with its whip whenever Ihsan enjoys arousing the female in me. But it’s a suffering too, weak and suppressed, powerless to rise to resistance and refusal, when Ihsan treats me as his toy, then goes happily off to sleep.”(34/35) : Nadia would like to be an educated person, but that bothers Ihsan who does not understand the necessity of pursuing something that is not in the interest of procuring and providing wealth, richness and social recognition. Although they have agreed before the marriage that she would continue to attend university in order to get her degree, after a few months he started pushing her to have a child in order to prevent her from finishing her education. Ihsan does not want to have control on his wife’s ordinary life only, he needs to dominate her mind, and this can happen if she is not a more educated person than he is. Since the first day of their marriage she has been nothing but his perfect doll, but after ten years she starts to rebel, gaining day after day her independence. : Gradually she stops to be “the daughter of that Arab woman who repeated her mother’s advice on her wedding night: ‘Fall in with everything he commands’,” and she begins to be always more aware and self-confident. First she wants to reach her economical independence, so for example, when her husband asks her if she prefers to keep the gold he has bought for her or if she would like him to sell it and buy her land in the place of it she answers: “Both, Ihsan. The two together won’t come to ten percent. That still leaves you nine tenths of the total. As of now, and until you’ve done it for me, we sleep in separate bedrooms.” Then she realizes that she will not need a man any more and that happens when she discovers that Jalal, Ihsan’s brother, the man she has always been in love with and the person that she thought would understand her, is nothing but a man like every other who is ready to treat her as his own property and his “sex toy”: “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 a female and he is a man. I, Nadia Al-Faqih, no one will be able to know or possess her. From this moment on I possess myself. They will se a face unknown to them.” The woman who only a few months before would not dare to refuse one of her husband’s orders, now is able to start her own business by opening a real estate office in London. : The process which leads Nadia to her complete liberation from Ihsan’s control reaches its most striking point when, towards the end of the book, she manages to rescue her husband’s dignity. He was victim of a trap set for him by one of his rivals in order to force him to conduct an illegal business: “He threatened to publish certain documents and photographs no one would want to see the light of day […] I had to buy his silence. Not for your sake, Ihsan, but to preserve my dignity and your image in front of the children.” It is this point that culminates in the progressive personal development of Nadia. : Maha, Umm Saad, and Nadia’ s stories, as we have seen, have been in some ways marked by the war. Harb, Maha’s husband, is killed during a battle against the British army; Umm Saad’s father has been a rebel during the French occupation in Syria, and Ihsan, Nadia’s husband, as a Palestinian, is a victim of the numerous wars connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, no one of our protagonists has been directly involved in the war. In A Balcony over the Fakihani by Liyana Badr, we meet other two ladies, Yusra and Su’ad, whose life is totally surrounded by politics and the horror of the war. The writer introduces Yusra in the first novella, A Land of Rock and Thyme, when she is still very young. Her family is Palestinian and, like many other families, they are forced to an eternal exile since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Yusra lives with her parents and eight brothers and sisters in the refugee camp of Tal Al-Zatar, in Lebanon. We meet her when she still is in the first phase of her life: she is a daughter and a sister. Through Yusra’s story, we can see how the war is able to modify this kind of relationship. : War is a phenomenon that leads to an unavoidable destabilization. First of all “death becomes familiar” (11), so everyone is prepared to lose a member of the family very easily, then war changes the priorities’ list. It appears clearly when Yusra’s father dies: she and her sister had gone fetch the water for the family, as they were used to, when their father was severely wounded. His condition appeared very serious, but he didn’t want his daughters to come back without water, so he didn’t call them back: “I received the shocking news: Father had been wounded soon after we left and had lived on for another four 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.’”(10) No one would expect a dying father not to call his daughter to see him for the last time, but when there is war, things change. Water, which is a hope for life, is more important than a father’s death. Another example of the turnover, produced by war, regarding family relationships is Jamal’s death. During the general escape after the attack of Tal Al-Zatar, Jamal, the fifteen years old brother of Yusra answers a soldier who was questioning him “[I’m] Palestinian.”(14) The man immediately shoots at him. His mother and his sisters see him falling and dying, but they can’t stop: “We passed by him, he had gone ahead of us because he was impatient. I just glanced at him, receiving such a shock my feet could no longer move forward or hold up my body. My nerves shattered, but I couldn’t stop or lean over him and touch him with my hand. If any of us were to stop by someone who had been killed, they would pick up us out and finish us off at once. I couldn’t. We moved on, right past him.”(14-15) The necessity of survival counts more than the normal instinct of a sister who sees her killed brother laying on the ground. : Yusra’s life follows the model of Maha’s in “Pillars of Salt” both in her second and third phases, that is in her role as a wife and then as mother. Her husband Ahmed is Palestinian as well and they married out of love but then he died quickly after the marriage. Like Maha, Yusra also discovers her pregnancy after her husband’s death, and wants to keep his memory alive so refuses to forget about him when pressured by other women. Her relationship to her son also reflects the same pattern observed in Pillars of Salt since Maha too considers her son to be an instrument of revenge hoping that he will one day fight against the British who killed his father and avenge his mother and protect her from his uncle who mistreated her. The presence of a man on the head of the family is very important in dealing with society, since he is the figure that protects that family. Therefore, the birth of a male child represents the continuation of the father image and is the hope for the lonely widowed mother of renewed protection and security: “Quickly decisively, she considered the matter. Three months in the womb. Six more to complete the pregnancy. Another person will be born. It would be a Palestinian, from its first moment in the world.” (25) From this quotation we can see the role played by the son has also in this case an additional nationalistic value: he will replace for her, the father that she lost, the husband that was killed, the security that she missed in society but, above all, he also serves as an embodiment of a disappearing identity. : In the second novella Su’ad marries a Tunisian man who joined the Palestinian resistance. But her marriage was not conventional because she left with Umar, before they get officially married which is a defying act of rebellion against her father’s wish. : Once married they lived first in Beirut then in the Shatila refugees camp. During their stay in Beirut, Su’ad got pregnant but because of the bad conditions in which they were living, she lost her baby. The description of losing the baby is expressed only in few sentences, not because it does not deserve attention or because it does not play an important role in a life of a woman, but because in this novella, the emphasis was more on the inhumane conditions that lead to this miscarriage: “I do have a vivid memory of coming home with the feeling of defeat, carrying a long prescription for drugs and vitamins. It wasn’t just a matter of losing the baby, it was anemia too and I was told I needed fresh air” (43). Su’ad marriage faced another big challenge when Umar fell seriously sick and was sent to Europe to be treated. There he fell in love with his treating doctor and they had an affair but after the treatment was completed he returned to his wife. Despite The fact the he loved his wife, he could not resist the love story with the European doctor because the relationship had a connotation and the realization of a dream and worked as an escape from reality, both from the personal point of view and the national political dimension. The novella ends with the husband’s death. It is interesting to remark how, possibly in an ironic bitter turn of fate, the caring loving husbands throughout these novels end up being dead and leaving wives and children behind them. : The setting of “Dreams of Trespass” by Fatima Marnissi takes place in Morocco and thus diverges from the main recurrent personal and political themes that we encountered in the novels, mostly dealing with the Middle East. Still, other themes remain the same and the difference in reality conveyed in this novel help to appreciate the plurality of experiences. “Dreams of Trespass” records the life of a girl born and raised inside a Harem. Two types of harem are contrasted: the country Harem where Fatima’s grandmother lives represents another concept of family. The man and all his co-wives help each other and live in a community. Whereas the urban type of Harem where Fatima lives presents a different structure: A grandmother, her two sons who are the masters of the Harem each has one wife. The concept of a harem here is on a smaller level, but both work as a prison for women. We cannot talk about the three phases in Fatima’s life since she remains a child throughout the novel but her parent’s relationship is interesting to analyze. Her mother seeks to separate herself from the Harem’s life but what bothers her most is the interference in her personal matters from all the members of the family. This is opposite to her own mother’s way of life in the rural harem where she shares her husband, place an existence with co-wives. This is the reason why she is constantly fighting with her husband over her independence, the husband although he tries to make his wife happy, does not have enough courage to leave the Harem and live on his own. : It is interesting to note Fatima’s perception as a child of the tension between the modern and the old-fashioned in her own family. The child could not escape the complex reality of her time torn between the two tendencies. Modernity is represented by her mother, on one side, who is aware of her own individuality and fights for her independence; and on the other side, conservatism is represented by her paternal grandmother who is still very attached to old-fashioned traditions and formalities of conduct. At this stage, we cannot anticipate and foreshadow the later development of this Fatima, but we can nevertheless draw some conjectures about her future. Will she take advantage of being exposed to the contrast between modernity and conservatism? Where would all this lead her to? : A similar questioning can be asked while encountering Asya, the main character of the novel entitled “In the Eye of the Sun”. She is a strong representative of all the three phases in the development of a woman’s life. First we meet her as a daughter of two professors teaching at Cairo’s university. Coming from an educated family, the setting is an intellectual one and the personal psychological and physical understanding of her character is one of the major themes in the novel. Asya is a free woman because her parents gave her both the freedom of choice and action. Unlike her friend Chrissie and all the main characters of the other novels who suffered of a certain type of social pressure, Asya’s problem is with herself. The body becomes the map on which indirect social codes are written and her struggle with herself reflects on the power of these forces and the impossibility of evading them in intimacy. If on the surface she acts as a modern woman with no traditional obligations and expectation, on a more personal level, she suffers from other issues that find expression mainly in her physical relationship with her husband. Her parents wanted to give her above all a free and cultivated way of life and therefore insisted on her education thinking that it was the tool that will empower her. Asya’s role as a wife is the guiding line throughout the book but it follows three stages of development, before marriage, after marriage and with the lover. Before her marriage Asya looked for breaking the rule and wanted to have sex with her fiancé who refused. But, on the first night of their marriage, when her now husband Saif tried to approach her, she couldn’t share with him the same expectations. Would she have had the same physical pain if she had made love to Saif before the marriage? The paradox is that even if she claimed to love and want to consume her marriage, every time her husband touched her, she would feel the same pain that would prevent her from fulfilling her desires. Saif’s reaction is noteworthy, he did not force his wife to have sex with him by claiming his right to; on the contrary, he accepted the lack of any physical relationship between them for years: “OK, Princess’ he’d said. ‘Let’s just leave it. I love you. I love you well enough to live with you like a sister” (302). Her feelings became mixed towards her husband. On one hand, she hated him because she considered him responsible for what was happening, that is because he no longer insisted on having sex with her, on the other hand, she needed his presence next to her as we can see when she went to Britain to obtain her PhD, it took her only a few months to ask for him to join her. He did join her and to do that he had to renounce a very good job he had with the United Nations. Although all her family appreciated this gesture and demonstration of love, Asya found in it a way to justify it for other reasons. She convinced herself that her husband joined her because he didn’t really like the job he was doing and he had the possibility of getting his PhD in Britain, he did not go there only to support her. Asya does reach her sexual fulfillment with a man, but it is another man not her husband. She was the one who started the relationship of adultery and asked for it. “It is so pleasant, he says looking into his coffee cup so deeply peaceful: spending the day with you. Would you like, says Asya watching him, to spend the night?” (539). How can a body reacts differently in two situations? Is it, one may ask, related to the cultural setting in which the love making takes place and to the different culture to which the lover belongs? It seems as if Asya, wanted to share a normal life with her husband but the fact that they both share the same culture had a more complex meaning and caused Asya’s aversion to sex as a rejection of that culture in general. Her sexuality became the mirror of complex and distant forms of oppression and prejudice that indirectly affected her even on the level of the unconscious. With her lover, Asya finds sexual fulfillment but she doesn’t have the same feelings she has for Saif. She quickly realizes that the relationship with Gerald does not procure her the emotional satisfaction she wants. “When I watch Saif walk away from me, I feel bereft lost- even if I had been miserable while I was with him. I am always waiting for him to come back. When I watch G. walk away I feel relieved. Not at first: at first when he walked away I used to feel expectant; expectant of his return. But for the last three months when he’s gone away, I felt relief with a bit of almost theoretical sadness at the edge” (591). When Saif knew about his wife’s affair he lost his mind. “Five years he says, five years. The pain is too much for you to take, you feel sick if I so much put my hand on your tits, you sneeze if I come near you. Then you go and open your legs to some fucking stranger” (623). The marriage is compromised for ever. Even if Asya will get rid of her lover, Saif will never forgive her. it is noteworthy to analyse the episode of Asya’s miscarriage. At first, it looks like a similar case to Su’ad’s but here the roles are reversed. Su’ad wanted to have a baby and considered her pregnancy to be a blessing on personal and social levels, while Asya, who is not facing the same hard conditions and social pressures, is against the idea of giving birth at this moment of her life. Again we see the double attitude of Asya this time towards her baby. Apparently, she doesn’t want that pregnancy but after loosing the baby she feels guilty and lonelier. Even after some years, she rethinks about that miscarriage dreaming of what her life would have been if she hadn’t lost the baby. She even turned her disappointment towards her husband and thought he was accusing her of not only wanting to lose the baby but actually helping the miscarriage happen. At the moment of separation Saif says “Why didn’t you die? Why didn’t you die instead of killing the baby?” (631). Asya’s life was marked by love, she was loved by her family, by her husband, by her friends and even by her lover, but what she wanted more is the escape from herself and her identity as a woman with specific roles to play. Everything she did or did not was marked by contradiction, a contradiction that is at the heart of the situation of the woman herself in a difficult society. During all the phases of her life, she refused to fit in the specific category that her society expected from her. Even though her family provided her with the possibility of an escape she still struggled with her sexuality and cultural heritage. Although Asya’ fulfilled her sexual development after years and years of frustration, she did not have the complete experience of the women in the other novels since her role was only related to her resistance to becoming a woman. : In these texts different versions of being a woman were presented. Every woman defined herself in a distinct role that gave her a sense of identity. For some of them, this role was imposed; for others, it was the result of a free choice and a proof of love. No matter what the conditions were, every woman in these novels suffered and struggled either with the self, the family, the society or a state conflict. The family is always present in the preoccupations of these women because it is the stepping stone for their entry into society.

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