Reply to Brinda J. Mehta

Abstract

Professor Mehta believes that my review essay trivializes the work of women and is, further, simply arrogant (Mehta 2010, XXX; see Mendola 2009). These charges are wrong, but tactically savvy: engaging in ad hominem attacks can distract from the substance of the review. They also mask the more cogent objections to my review, although I believe these are incorrect in a different sense.So let me turn to those more cogent objections. In my review essay, I expressed my frustration with Professor Mehta's reliance on the giants of postcolonial feminist in the world: authors such as Hanan alShaykh, Assia Djebar, and Fatima Mernissi. Professor Mehta takes exception to my use of the term popular to describe these well-known reading this descriptor as condescension rather than fact. While al-Shaykh, Djebar, and Mernissi are well worth our time and attention as critics, an engagement with the woman writer who has not yet become a Western phenomenon remains critical to our work in the field. To focus primarily on authors who have come to the attention of Western (or, to be more precise, U.S.) academic elites via the great publishing houses of Paris or London, without commenting at length on the economic, cultural, and imaginary functions of these houses, refuses to acknowledge that the kinds of women's which attain this level of popularity do so through a capitalist, colonialist system that must not remain unproblematized.Indeed, it is this system that the opening of my review attempted to address. Professor Mehta objects to my questioning of the term Arab women writers, as well as my admittedly provocative suggestion that we may view this category, in certain circumstances, as a kind of literary prostitution. Indeed, we should be extremely wary of rejecting women who self-identify as women writers. To do so is to deny them their right to self-determination and to ignore their voices. This in no way changes the fact that the category Arab women writers and the genre of Arab women's writing are at least in part the creation of European publishing houses. These are marketing categories; created to sell novels and promote a univocal narrative of Middle Eastern and North African women's experience, one that is written in or translated into the colonizer's tongue. The generic conventions of Arab women's writing can exclude the stories of Middle Eastern and North African women who do not identify as Arab, do not wish to write semi- or completely autobiographical narratives, and are not literate in the ex-colonizer's language.Now, this is a delicate and immensely complex problem that cannot be solved by polemics on either side. After all, in French or English (as opposed to Arabic) can free the author to express herself on matters of gender or sexuality which, for cultural or linguistic reasons, cannot be expressed in the mother tongue. …