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This collection of stories, speeches, essays, poems and memoirs bears fierce testimony to a tradition of brave Arab feminist writing in the face of subjugation by a Muslim patriarchy. Palestinian Fadwa Tuqan's father demanded that she compose political poetry yet kept her secluded from the outside world. Zainaba (last name omitted), a nurse from Mauritania, West Africa, who herself underwent female circumcision, or clitoridectomy, says, "It is not a sin if it is not done, but it is better if it is," and exhorts a group of midwives to modify the disfigurement ("A woman with no clitoris is like a mud wall, a piece of cardboard, without spark, without goals, without desire. ... It must not be all cut off!") and to use antiseptics. And Egyptian Alifa Rifaat, who wrote in the secrecy of her bathroom until her husband's death, offers stories about a girl undergoing a clitoridectomy and about a bride who fears her husband will discover she isn't a virgin so she inserts powdered glass inside herself to draw blood on her wedding night. Egyptians Ihsan Assal's and Andree Chedid's fiction depicts, respectively, a husband who incarcerates his "recalcitrant" young wife with the permission of the courts and a 60-year-old woman who plots the murder of her husband. An editorial by Egyptian Amina Said laments the return of the veil. Badran translated and edited Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879-1924 ; Cooke is the author of War's Other Voices: Women Writers in the Lebanese Civil War.… (more)
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--Wadida Wassef's "Hasan's Wives," a short story about a rowdy
--Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas's examination of women's roles in the Algerian revolution against French rule. Some quotes I loved from her piece: "Nor was she considered a fighter when she collected fuel or food for the fighters, or carried their guns, or guided them through the mountains. She was merely helping the men. Only the French army acknowledged her action by imprisoning and torturing her in concentration camps and killing her."
"We are caught between two legitimacies: belonging to our people or identifying with other oppressed women...We are not even aware of the differences between one Muslim country and another. Let Muslim women step out of their national ghettos. Let them see that the clitoridectomy practiced in Africa is unthinkable in Asia, that the veil worn in Arab countries is absent in sub-Saharan Africa, that none of these practices are based on religious precepts, but that religion everywhere backs such practices whenever they allow for greater control over women.
Let us dream of secular states. Let us dream of the separation of religion and state. Let us dream of the end of using nationalism to further oppress the already oppressed."
I didn't learn much from these works, but they were clearly very important when they were written. It's just that the arguments are so sad and basic: maybe women aren't less moral than men, perhaps we could teach women to read, perhaps women should not be legally beaten to death by their relatives. I don't know history very well, certainly not Middle Eastern or African history, but this book didn't teach me anything about that, either. Really, I think this book was a good reminder, but not something people should seek out.