Situating Arab women’s writing in a feminist ‘global gothic’: madness, mothers and ghosts

Roxanne Douglas

doi:10.1177/14647001211019188

Abstract

This article sketches a new way of approaching some contemporary Levantine (Egyptian and Lebanese) feminist texts. Extending Glennis Byron’s notion of the ‘global gothic’, I examine Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) as examples of an Arab feminist Gothic approach, which serves as a framework to theorise difficult and pressing questions that feminism poses regarding women’s rights. Arab feminist Gothic writers use the jahiliyyah period, or the ‘time of ignorance’, as a folkloric referential backdrop for texts which theorise the female condition under contemporary patriarchal society. The presence of ghosts, madness, doubles in the form of the folkloric qarina spirit-doubles and dreams can be read as part of a local Gothic feminist mode. This as-yet unacknowledged Arab feminist Gothic tradition, while emerging from debates over statehood and postcolonial subjectivities, delves into the intensity of personal traumas through the lens of women’s relationships to other women, especially mothers and daughters. Taking Arab feminist fiction as its focus, this article models how feminist scholarship can use genre, particularly the Gothic, to trace artistic feminist theorising in non-western contexts.

Highlights

Zahra’s ambivalent relationship to reality in the text is characteristic of the Arab feminist Gothic approach that I outline in this article, expressing contention with a context in which women’s experiences have been excluded from historical records and repressed in patriarchal codes of social propriety
Without firm facts and histories about women’s lives, the Gothic mode offers an artistic point of entry. This argument demonstrates that some contemporary Arab feminist texts – here, Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) – can be read as part of what Glennis Byron calls the ‘globalgothic’, a tradition of locally inflected Gothics, which, Byron argues, are ‘intricately connected to historically specific conditions, [and] to the development of an increasingly integrated global economy’ (2015: 1)
The Gothic genre, as Byron puts it, is ‘a ready-made language’ (2015: 2), but what can be said with this language in the global feminist context has not yet been discussed when it comes to Levantine authors such as Hannan Al-Shaykh, Mansoura Ez Eldin and Joumana Haddad

Summary

Introduction

Zahra’s ambivalent relationship to reality in the text is characteristic of the Arab feminist Gothic approach that I outline in this article, expressing contention with a context in which women’s experiences have been excluded from historical records and repressed in patriarchal codes of social propriety. This argument demonstrates that some contemporary Arab feminist texts – here, Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) – can be read as part of what Glennis Byron calls the ‘globalgothic’, a tradition of locally inflected Gothics, which, Byron argues, are ‘intricately connected to historically specific conditions, [and] to the development of an increasingly integrated global economy’ (2015: 1).

Results

Conclusion