The Land as Woman: Esther Raab and the Afterlife of a Metaphorical System

Abstract

The land as woman is one of the most deeply rooted metaphorical systems in Jewish as well as Western and Middle Eastern cultures, and it has been used to support the discourses of colonialism and nationalism throughout history, as well as in some of the most beautiful devotional poetry. The metaphor has its origins in the Hebrew Bible, where the male prophet, ventriloquizing a male God, addresses Zion as his beloved—yet often unfaithful—wife, thus metaphorically and lexically linking idolatry with adultery and whoredom (both are zenut in biblical Hebrew). In modern Hebrew poetry, the male poet lays claim to this biblical trope, but now within a secular, nationalist “conquest” of the land as woman. In this article, I explore what happens when modernist women poets critique a tradition that views women always as metaphors, never as literal subjects. I read Esther Raab’s early poetry as an example of the revolutionary work of modern Hebrew women poets who develop a new erotics of address to the land that calls into question patriarchal models of conquest and subjugation.