Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing - Softcover

Badran, Margot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253205778 ISBN 13: 9780253205773

Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr, 1990

Synopsis

Opening the Gates includes more than sixty selections, drawn from almost the entire Arab world. Arranged around the themes of awareness, rejection, and activism, the selections give strong voice universally held yearnings often in conflict with deep-seated traditions.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Opening the Gates includes more than sixty selections, drawn from almost the entire Arab world. Arranged around the themes of awareness, rejection, and activism, the selections give strong voice universally held yearnings often in conflict with deep-seated traditions.

Reviews

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.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253205778
• ISBN 13: 9780253205773
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448
• Editor: Cooke Miriam