Rebellion, Creativity and Maturity in Arab Women Writings

Abstract

Side by side with their Arab compatriot male writers and their Western counterparts of both genders, the Arab women writers have found a space for their original literary writings and for the specificity of their complex identity as being Arabs, women and writers. By analyzing The Stone of Laughter by Huda Barakat and The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif, we attempt to explore each novel’s specificity and each writer’s literary creativeness, both of which express Arab women writers’ complex identity. If women narratives are partly fictions, they include stories set by the narratives within which their lives are intertwined. Arab women’s voices seem still very much present in post-colonial literature, certainly more audible than ever. They need to claim their right to exist and have to clear a psychic space for themselves. They can afford to be not only parodic but playful and highly sophisticated as well.In this paper, we will compare and contrast the two works; this exercise will not be of an evaluative nature, but it will rather be an exercise of re-arguing that the Arab woman writer is certainly of great artistic and intellectual capacities as much as any writer of the other gender or culture. We choose to compare Barakat’s حجر الضحك (The Stone of Laughter) and Soueif’s The Map of Love in order to explore, to some extent, the divergences at the linguistic, thematic and narrative levels, to unveil the importance of the two trends of Arab woman literature, that is to say Arabic language literary writings and hybrid literary writings.