Memoir

Abstract

the fall of 1995, 1 went to Syria to study women's writings. I had little idea what I might find. Even specialists of Arabic literature did not know much about the cultural scene inside Hafiz Asad's Syria of the 1990s. Many assumed that such a regime is so repressive that writers of conscience are either in jail, like Nizar Nayyuf, or in exile, like Zakaria Tamer. In 1992, the critic Jean Fontaine reduced the whole of Syrian literature to nightmare, overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal. How could it be otherwise in a climate devoid of freedom of expression, where there are no intermediaries between the people and the state? (Fontaine 1992:110). Were there women writing inside Syria? If there were, what were their preoccupations? Two good friends of mine are Syrian women writers who left Damascus in the 1960s to settle in Beirut. Ghada Samman (b.1942) is one of the Arab world's best known fiction writers, and Huda Naamani (b.1930) is a highly admired Sufi poet. I had met them just after graduate school, in the summer of 1980, when I was in Beirut doing preliminary research for a book on Lebanese civil war literature.