“Women's Writing on Women's Writing”: Mayy Ziyada's Literary Biographies as Egyptian Feminist History

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper looks as three literary biographies written by the Arab feminist writer Mayy Ziyada (1886–1941), published in Cairo at the beginning of the twentieth century: Bahithat al-Badiya (1920), Aisha Taymur (1926) and Warda al-Yaziji (1926). Ziyada is a pioneer Arab woman writer and feminist intellectual who wrote articles which were published in various newspapers issued in Egypt at the time, in addition to her several books of essays. The focus of this paper, however, will be directed to her three literary biographies of Egyptian pioneer feminist writers Malak Hifni Nassif (1886–1918), Aisha Taymur (1840–1902) and Warda al-Yaziji (1838–1924). I begin by exploring the multiple voices embedded in Ziyada's biographies followed by a discussion of the cultural discourses and feminist politics in the three texts. I then examine the construction of women's lives involved in life-writing, while in the last part of the paper I look at Ziyada's literary biographies within the paradigm of “women's writing on women”. The paper concludes with reflections on the three texts, in terms of literary biography as cultural memory and feminist history.