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A Woman's Voice for the Arab World
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19675 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
1,802 Words |
| Author
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Charles R. Larson
Charles R. Larson is an internationally known authority on
Third World literature. He is the author of The Emergence of
African Fiction, The Novel in the Third World, and American
Indian Fiction. His novel The Insect Colony is set in West
Africa during the Nigerian civil war. He has edited several
anthologies of international writing and served as general
editor of Collier Books' African/American Library. He teaches
literature at American University in Washington, D.C. |
THE STORY OF ZAHRA
Hanan al-Shaykh
London: Quartet Books, 1986
192 pp.
WOMEN OF SAND AND MYRRH
Hanan al-Shaykh
London: Quartet Books, 1989
280 pp.
The two remarkable short stories that are published here are significant not only as Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh's first publications in the United States but also because they introduce a voice from the Arab world that few people have heard before. We are hardly even accustomed to reading fiction by Islamic male writers, let alone by a woman as unique as Hanan al-Shaykh.
When the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Noble Prize in literature in 1988, he was the first writer from the Arab world accorded such attention. Though several of his works were available in American editions at that time, his novels and short stories are only now beginning to be translated with significant regularity. Salman Rushdie's death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini made The Satanic Verses a best-seller in England and the United States, but the book was largely unread by the people who purchased it. In many ways, Rushdie's earlier novels were not only more accessible but more significant. Our fictive exposure to the modern Arab world has been sadly limited.
Hanan al-Shaykh was born in Lebanon in 1945. Raised in a traditional Shiite Muslim household, she covered her hair and wore dresses that disguised her body. In 1963, she was sent to Cairo, where she attended the American College for Girls. Her career as a writer (initially as a journalist) began four years later after her return to Beirut. Subsequently, with her husband, she lived in Saudi Arabia for a year, then returned to war-torn Lebanon, and finally moved on to London, where she lives with her family today.
Custom and tradition
What interests me about the work of Hanan al-Shaykh is both the question of gender and the extraordinary opening into the Arab world in her fiction. Clues to the powers of her work are in the stories reprinted here--especially when they are examined
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