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THIRD AND ARAB WORLD FEMINISMS: A PERSPECTIVE
This chapter, which provides a perspective of Third world and Arab feminisms, is an attempt to address whatever cultural divide, distance and silence that may still remain in Western feminist criticism regarding non-Western literature and criticism by women in both Third and Arab worlds. It does this by foregrounding recent Thlrd world criticism which seeks to redress the more customary Eurocentric vision. In the past, as Deirdre Lashgari (1995: 1-2) correctly obsetVes, ‘mainstream arbiters of literary equality’ have sometimes worked from assumptions unconsciously rooted in gender, class, and Eurocentric culture, with what she calls a bias toward ‘authorial distance’. Fortunately, since the publication of Tillie Olsen’s provocative article ‘Silences in Literature’ in 1965, feminist writing in the United States, as in Europe, has taken seriously the roles of silence and anger in the lives and literary production of women. Until fairly recently, however, relatively little had been written, as Lashgari points out in her introductionary essay to Violence, Silence and Anger: ‘To speak the unspeakable: Implications of Gender, « Race », Class and Culture’ (1995), on the specific conjunction of feminist issues with women’s culturally shaped responses to violence in all its multi-faceted forms. The Afro-Arabic responses by Mariama Ba and Nawal El-Saadawi, for instance, provide an example of a kind of non-violence/ violence through their liberal authorial approach to moving beyond the veil. The liberatory voice … is characterized by opposition, by resistance. It demands that paradigms shift – that we learn to talk – to listen – to hear [and to write] in a new way. (bell hooks, 1989: 9) Although opposition and resistance imply violence, hooks clearly defines this violence as non-physical and cerebral, as amelioratory rather than revolutionary. Hence, the perception of ‘violence’ depends, of course, on perspective, on what one terms the angle of one’s vision. Having identified the nature of this sort of violence, it can be difficult to name it publicly, and difficult for writers and critics to make themselves heard, as Lashgari notes (1995: 1) and Ba and El-Saadawi demonstrate. When Cherrie Moraga (1986: 181) speaks of ‘the threat of genocide’ suffered by people of colour, she is referring not only to the violence of overt action but also to the hidden, structural violence of patriarchal oppression and to the passive acquiescence of women in society who permit it to continue. So, too, economic and socio-religious violence in the texts of both Mariama Ba and N awal El-Saadawi (the literary focus of this study) feature as ‘noisy silence’ (Dorothy D. Wills’s term in Lashgari, 1995: 158). A fuller and ongoing discussion of the concept of ‘violence’, and its attendant paradigm shills within the contextual framework of feminism and feminist criticism or writing in the Third and Arab worlds is continued later in this chapter and in Chapters Four to Six.
For the purposes of this present discussion, the exploration of feminism necessarily involves definitions of African feminism and Arab feminism. Chandra Malpade Mohanty, co-editor of the text Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (1991) -naturally moderated by other leading feminists in both the First and Third world contexts – is used as the seminal text in examining African and Arab feminist literary theory and the historical literary practice against a socio-political background. The term ‘feminism’, as it is encoded in the Arab feminist world, is defined and examined to show that feminist theory, despite the various touchstones, can never be viewed as singularly or universally ‘true’. The role of religion (Islam) in the Arab world and its several effects on women are touched upon here and more fully elaborated on in later chapters. The practice of metissage – through the concept of heteroglossia – in order to enable travesia (or crossing) is proposed as a possible solution to materialize Mohanty’s plea that feminist praxis and theory should be written and applied within a cross-cultural, international framework whereby a unitary sisterhood, notwithstanding its various differences, can be attained. For this reason, many comparitivists today ‘weave together multiple disciplines in a reading practice that is called metissage, a practice which recognizes that representation cuts across the boundaries of juridical, politica~ anthropological, and artistic discourses’ as Margaret R. Higonnet (1994: 2) notes. For literarypmposes, heteroglossia is defined by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981: 263, 428) as a word ‘uttered in that place and at that time that will have a meaning different than [sic] it would have under any other conditions’. It incorporates ‘a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships’ which ‘disperse into rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia … dialogization’.
Therefore, the task, which confronts both comparative literature and feminist critics seeking to realize Mohanty’s ideal of a ‘sisterhood’ without borders, mentioned above, is that of reading at the crossroads, of’reading along the borderlines of silence’ as Higonnet obseiVes in her introduction to Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature (1994: 16). (It must be noted that the term ‘crossroads’ has its own inherent ‘nuances’ as it is used to define what is effectively the witching hour in Igbo mythology. The use of the term ‘crossroads’ here, does not seiVe to invoke Achebe’s temporal, mythopoeic usage. Rather, it involves the process of writing back.) Gloria Anzaldua’s epigraph (1987: 195): ‘To survive the Borderlands you must live sinfronteras’ voices a dream which, according to Mariama Ba (see especially Chapter Five and the analysis of Scarlet Song), should be cherished by all human beings. Borderlands, as Higonnet (1994: 1) remarks, may feed growth and exploration or may conceal a mine field. Nonetheless, calls to redraw boundaries, or to ‘find theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries’ (Anzaldua, 1987: xxv) are being and should be made with increasing insistence.
SCARLET SONG (1981; 1994)
more central Wolofproverb: ‘Nit, nit, modi garabam! Man, man [my emphasis] is his own remedy!’ (165). The complexity of this second novel ofMariama Ba inheres in these two Wolof proverbs. As already intimated, while the one W olof proverb (‘kou wathie sa toundeu, tound’eu boo feke mou tasse’) advocates purism in cultural relations and implies a disapproval of marriage across cultural boundaries, the other ‘Nit, nit, modi garabam!’ implicitly reflects the redeeming message in this novel: reconciliation in bridging the cultural divide is possible and, in fact, required and demanded by the Islamic concept of humanity which is, in essence, a religious principle.
Culture, argues Leopold Senghor (Cham, 1987: 100) is the bedrock of development. Culture, says Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1987: 100) in explication, is much more than just folklore. It encapsulates the entire spectrum of relations and activities in any given society. Consequently, as Cham (1987: 100) points out, any movement in or of society must have its feet firmly rooted in a healthy culture if it is to be of any lasting and meaningful value to the welfare of individuals and society at large. And a healthy culture, in Ngugi’s terms, is a culture of equality, a culture free of all forms of exploitation, and, above all, a culture rooted in the true traditions of the people. Leila Sebbar, the Algerian female writer, endorses this notion of a culture rooted in the true tradition. Though born and raised in Algeria, (she has a French mother and an Algerian father) she has moved to Paris where she lives today. As Charlotte Bruner ( 1993: 208) notes, Sebbar’s research interests centre on the colonial concept of the ‘bon negre’ in eighteenth-century colonial literature and on nineteenth-century education for girls. Her style transmits the ‘uncertainties of the illiterate or semi-literate immigrants, caught between two cultures, two languages, two religions’ (Bruner, 1993: 209). In the Muslim context and as already noted in the previous chapters, Muhammad, the Prophet, promotes a culture of equality, in advocating the equality of women, an equality which stems from the true Islamic tradition, as it is ordained by the Qur’an. In both So Long a Letter and Scarlet Song, Mariama Ba uses ‘the strength, the maturity and finesse ofher imagination and artistry to reinforce this fundamental notion of culture and society’ (Cham, 1987: 100-101) and the entitlement to equality when she treats the clear conflict between the traditional role of women and the present-day aspirations of contemporary women as a fundamental precept in these novels. The lack of clarity about the status of women, as part of the general culture conflict in a Muslim patriarchal society – which still advocates polygamy: ‘Mireille is a Muslim, … She knows that Ousmane has a right to four wives’ ( 127) – is at once exposed and explored by the author in Scarlet Song. Charity Waciuma, born in Kenya, is another African author who subscribes to Mariama Ba’s notion of change and the practice of monogamy. Waciuma writes frankly of woman’s role in Kenya. Like Ba, with ‘philosophical acceptance’ (Bruner’s terms, 1994: 245) Waciuma advocates the necessity for change: For myseH: I have decided against polygamy, but its rights and wrongs are still being argued continually and furiously in our schools and colleges and debating clubs .. .. I hate it because it hurts the position and dignity of women and exaggerates the selfishness of men.
(Waciuma, 1969: 11-12) In a similar fashion to Chapter Four, but with different emphasis Mariama Ba ‘writes back’ once more from ‘beyond the veil’ in terms of the four interrelated themes: education, marriage, motherhood and sisterhood, this time embedded in the theme of cultural conflict. Therefore, as Dorothy S. Blair ponders in her ‘In Memoriam’ to Scarlet Song, the novel ‘is a crusade against social injustices, but the author also pleads the case for pride in individual identities, although the negative aspects of these do not escape her’ (Scarlet Song, 1994: iii). In a similar fashion to Mariama Ba, Rokhayatou Aminata Maiga-Ka, also born in Senegal, says of her own work: ‘My main themes are polygamy, caste and education … a criticism of our society …. Afiican women are most of the time victims who do not react enough to their fates and are toys between the hands of men’ (correspondence with C. H. Bruner, 1990, when Ka was a participant in the International Writing Programme at Iowa City. Quoted by Bruner, 1990: 190). Ifeoma Okeye, born in Nigeria, underscores the notion of social injustices. She addresses the trauma of battered women, as well as traditional economic practices that shackle women despite their education and career status. She declares that her work is aimed at upli:ftment: ‘ … if I can, through my writing, bring about the upliftment of the oppressed, and those discriminated against, whether male or female, [I will]’ (correspondence with C. H. Bruner: quoted by Bruner, 1993: 187).
Chapter 1 : Contextualising Islam
Chapter 2 : ‘The veil’ and fragmentation
Chapter 3 : Third and Arab world feminisms: a perspective
Chapter 4: So Long a Letter (1980; 1989)
Chapter 5 : Scarlet Song (1981; 1994)
Chapter 6: A thematic approach to selected texts by N. El-Saadawi: Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958; 1988); Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1983; 1986); God Dies by the Nile (1974; 1985); Woman at Point Zero (1975; 1983); and The Innocence of the Devil (1992; 1994).
Epilogue
Bibliography
