The Loved Ones
Page 32
With this progressive history behind them, women began to write in the 1960s and after. The work of women pioneers—whether as writers or political activists—gave confidence to new generations of women. Professional women—doctors, engineers, scientists, community leaders—marked Iraqi public life. In 1959, Naziha al-Dulaimi became the first woman minister in the Arab world.1
Alia Mamdouh
When Alia Mamdouh started publishing in the 1970s, she followed a solid corpus of women’s writing. But while Iraqi women had managed to write and even to occupy important professional and public positions, they had not escaped social pressures. Traditions cannot be deconstructed nor dismantled easily, even though progressive men and women may want to uphold the equal rights of women as citizens, and even though such rights may also be codified into laws. Still, women continued to be expected to act submissively and passively.
Alia Mamdouh’s family in the late 1940s and 1950s pressed as hard on her to conform as other families did on other young girls of her generation. Born in Baghdad in 1944, the daughter of a policeman, in a household of women including a pious grandmother, she learned quickly that she was expected to stifle her self. The “I”—as she put it—had to be repressed (Mamdouh 2002, 203), but she quickly figured out how to find outlets for the self. In a testimony that wavers between reportage and metaphoric language, Mamdouh writes:
My father was a handsome man, boisterous and good but also tormented by neurosis. He was the first policeman—his profession—I had to face and I was determined to confuse him by being submissive at home and rebellious outside. In addition I used to swing my hips to make up for my ugliness. During those years I became aware of the incongruity that existed between oppressive traditions and the bird who wanted to sing separately from the flock of boys and girls of the family. I was certain that one day I would fly away from them for good. And I withdrew into myself when I understood that they wanted to extract every thought in my head, one by one, like decayed teeth. (Mamdouh 1998, 65–66)
Alia Mamdouh’s writing is both strange and intimate: There is something startlingly wild in her style and something soothingly familiar at the same time. She reproduces the unheimlich, an uncanny feeling, when one reads her multilayered prose. She writes in a personal tone about “the darkest and most dangerous sites” (66). Though she does not feel hostility to men—in fact she writes beautifully and erotically about her love who was double her age and a married man—yet she finds in womanhood a motherland:
I grew up and became savage and tormented; I traveled through fiery places, touched the flame, and did not ask for a glove to protect me. We are the flame. I do not distinguish between women of my country and women of other countries, for all women are my country. (67)
In her characteristic irony, Mamdouh depicts her relationship with her man as a rebellion against patriarchal norms, only to find out how deceptively bound she was: “I . . . ran away with the one I loved and unloaded the burden of fear unto a man much older than myself who trained me to fear nothing but him” (65).
While she was still a middle-school student, Alia’s father passed away, and she and her brother had to work to make ends meet while attending an evening school program (Mamdouh 2002, 206). She graduated in 1971 with a BA in psychology from al-Mustansiriyya University in Baghdad. When her husband had to leave Iraq for political reasons in 1964, she went along with him to Beirut, where they stayed for three years.2 In 1982, Mamdouh left Iraq again with her son, but without her husband, who stayed in Iraq until his death in 2005. Mamdouh worked as editor of several journals published in Beirut: Al-‘Ulum (Science) and Al-Fikr Mu‘asir (Contemporary Thought); Al-Rasid (The Observer), published in Baghdad, and she was also head of the Iraqi office of Shu’un Falistiniyya (Palestinian Affairs), published in Tunis. When she left for Beirut and later traveled to Rabat, Cardiff, Brighton, and Paris (where she resides now), she contributed to the cultural pages of prominent dailies and monthlies and participated in literary and cultural symposia in Europe, North America, and the Arab world. She received a prestigious fellowship from the European Parliament of Writers in 2002, during which she completed her novel, Al-Mahbubat (The Loved Ones).
Mamdouh published two collections of short stories in Beirut, Iftitahiyya lil-al-dahik (An Overture for Laughter) (1973) and Hawmish ila al-sayyida ba’ (Margins for Madam B) (1977). Between 1981 and 2003, she published five novels in Baghdad, Cairo, Beirut, and London. Her sixth and most recent novel, Al-Tashahi (Desiring), was published in 2007 in Beirut. She is also the author of a critical book, Musahabat: Qira’a fi al-hamish al-ibda‘i (Accompaniments: Reading on the Margin of Creativity) (1993), published in Rabat.
Mamdouh’s Fiction
One of Mamdouh’s short stories which has been translated into English, “Crossing Over” (Mamdouh 2005a, 512–13), illustrates her poetics of storytelling—her gift for capturing everyday details, her sharp and economic characterization, coupled with an element of suspense that eroticizes as well as triggers anticipation. The story, narrated in the first person, is about a flâneuse in Beirut, clearly an outsider to the city but not a tourist. It is precisely her status as outsider, with some apprehension about strolling around the city, that makes her notice the intricacies of what she sees in a fashionable Beirut district:
Buicks and Fords and Mercedeses, churned out by the technological machine, passed by. . . . There were a young woman and a young man, smiling fondly at one another. They were leaning against a car in a side street, supposing they were unobserved, but I saw them and I caught my breath. (512)
This passage not only delineates the setting and the gaze of the narrator, but also eroticizes the cityscape. It is followed by a close-up of a wealthy woman—a blasé cosmopolitan—who comes to shop but nothing appeals to her: “Her skin was as clear as crystal, her face faultlessly made up, her eyes like wild flowers—though they seemed incapable of focusing on anything for long” (512). The economy of descriptions and the depth of characterization is a signature of Mamdouh’s style. The narrator then notes another woman of a different type. First, the narrator spots her walking with difficulty then she sees her getting rid of her shoes and walking barefoot—a free spirit:
A lady crossing the street nearby had a strange, artificial way of walking and moving: tack, tack, tack. As she reached the other pavement, the heel of her shoe flew off. She didn’t turn back but limped on, before throwing off the other heel too . . . she took both shoes off, flung them in the nearest garbage can, and strolled barefoot into a café. (512)
Having herself observed others with her sharp eyes, the narrator finds herself under the gaze of another person—observed in an act of reversal: “Suddenly I realized I was under siege from a man wearing dark glasses, tall and elegant . . . the man kept looking toward me, then away from me again, in all directions, without once venturing to take off his glasses” (513). Eventually, the narrator gathers enough courage to stand next to him and to draw his attention by dropping her matchbox, only to have him ask her to help him cross over to the other sidewalk. We—as readers—discover with the narrator and belatedly, that the tall elegant man is blind. Yet this is more than a surprise ending in the style of Maupassant. The finale—in which the narrator responds to the request, by taking the stranger’s two hands, and saying “You’re like me. . . . You want to cross to the other side!” (513)—turns the story into something other than an incidental anecdote. It makes us rethink the last words pregnant with double meaning. Crossing over becomes more than the physical act. It indicates a going beyond and moving toward, transcending the difficulty of separation. There is also a double entendre in the motif of blindness. The narrator is as “blind” as the blind man. She is blind metaphorically, and he is blind literally. The story also embodies satire aimed at the self: the narrator mocks herself for having presumed a certain male desire for her when the man was not even able to see her.
In “Al-Juththa” (The Corpse), collected in Hawamish ila al-sayyida ba’, Mamdouh
’s aptitude for shocking her readers is apparent (1977, 83–89). Erotic obsessions and necrophilia are joined. Having lost her husband and sitting alone next to his corpse at the wake, the widow indulges in embracing her dead husband and copulating with him. Rather than conceal their desires, Mamdouh’s women articulate them even if that means breaking taboos and the sanctity of the dead (Ghazoul 2004b, 8–9). In most of Mamdouh’s works the erotic is present both as a motif and as a drive as in her short story depicting lesbian desire in “Presence of the Absent Man” (2000c). Mamdouh’s very style—elusive and seductive—eroticizes the text.
The five novels of Alia Mamdouh function as a quintet. Like the works of William Faulkner or Thomas Hardy, they create a fictional universe. Instead of Mississippi or Wessex, we have the complex world of Iraq and Iraqis. The novels also move chronologically with the protagonist who matures from nine-year-old Huda in Habbat al-naftalin (1986) (Mothballs [1996]/Naphtalene [2005b/c]) to middle-aged Suhaila in Al-Mahbubat (2003a) (The Loved Ones). Thus, there are continuity and development at the same time. As we read the novels of Mamdouh we feel we are immersed in her Iraqi world with leitmotifs that function synchronically. The characters in the five novels develop through time as they grow older and move to different settings. Her sixth novel, Al-Tashahi (Desiring), continues to weave sexuality with politics, by focusing on a protagonist, a former Communist and a translator, who has lost his virility (Yusuf 2007).
What distinguishes the writing of Mamdouh among such contemporary Iraqi women writers as Daisy al-Amir, Lutfiyya al-Dulaimi, Salima Saleh, Buthaina al-Nasiri, Ibtisam Abdallah, Haifa Zangana, and Betool Khedairi is her bold focus on the female body as a sight and arena without sparing details or veiling by recourse to allusions. Her work is body-politics par excellence. And yet her depiction of sexuality is never facile or voyeuristic.
Mamdouh’s first novel, Layla wa’l-dhi’b (Layla and the Wolf), published in Baghdad in 1980, is set in Lebanon. As Abu-Haidar sums it up: “The novel is the doomed love between a Lebanese man and woman caught in the political conflicts of the Middle East: the civil war in Lebanon and the Arab-Israeli struggle” (1998, 306). Both the ideological thrust of the novel and the author’s efforts to use an Arabic dialect (the Lebanese) in the fictional dialogue that is not her native one, leave their shadow on the artistic dimension of the work—as critics, and the author herself, have pointed out. The title of the novel is a familiar one to Arab readers as it is the same title given to the Arabic translation of Little Red Riding Hood. The intertextuality is not random; it is meant to recreate, albeit in grown-up fiction, the contrast between a naïve and innocent woman, Layla, and the deception around her not unlike that of the treacherous wolf in the children’s tale.
Mamdouh did not become notable as an Arab novelist until she published Habbat al-naftalin (Mothballs [1996]/Naphtalene [2005b/c]) in Cairo in 1986. Closely corresponding to the life of the author in the 1950s, the novel’s episodic structure offers a panorama of life in Baghdad just before the 1958 revolution that eliminated the monarchy and the ancien regime. The events and the ambiance are presented through the eyes and consciousness of a nine-year-old, Huda, the girl protagonist. Mamdouh manages to illuminate both the inside and intimate dimensions of a middle-class Iraqi household and the outside public turmoil in the streets on the eve of political change. The choice of a young girl who straddles the inside/outside and her naïve but telling description is a clever one. Huda barely understands the implications of tensions and thus is uninhibited about mentioning what she observes or hears, contributing to the unfolding of events and relations that remain publicly unspoken in Iraqi society. Mamdouh certainly crossed red lines in her novel and was faced with severe critiques by conservative critics and in traditional circles.
The novel appeals to readers in other cultures because it presents the customs and daily rituals of an Iraqi family, including visits to public baths known as Turkish baths. Yet, Mamdouh does not indulge in a folkloristic Baghdad nor does she exoticize her city. Mamdouh’s narrative techniques allow the immediacy and spontaneity of the child-narrator to surface and amuse. This novel was selected for the Mediterranean Memory project of translation and it was rendered into English in several editions as well as into French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, and Catalan. It was translated into English by Peter Theroux under the title of Mothballs by Garnet, a British publishing house, in a series of “Arab Women Writers.” The series won the 1995 “Women in Publishing New Venture Award.” Later the translation was revised and published under the title of Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York and by the American University in Cairo Press (2005b/c). British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcasted excerpts from Naphtalene, and the work became academically known and taught in courses in Arabic and comparative literature, gender and women’s writing, and postcolonial and cultural studies. In Arabic, too, the novel was reissued in Beirut by the prestigious publishing house, Dar al-Adab, under its original title (2000b).
The third novel of Mamdouh, Al-Wala‘ (Craving) was published in 1995 and was translated into French (under the title La Passion [2003b]) and into German. Starting with this novel, Mamdouh’s style moved toward interior monologues and an epistolary form deployed to articulate the inner world of characters. Mamdouh has acknowledged the impact of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves on this tendency (Abu-Haidar 1998, 309). But we can find the traces of such an approach in Mamdouh’s earlier writing. In her acclaimed and stylistically straightforward novel, Naphtalene, the protagonist-narrator uses both the first-person pronoun and—at times—the second-person pronoun, as if she were addressing herself. From that novel, we can see an incipient inclination toward exploring the inner dynamics of multidimensional characters and an attempt to view the self as both enunciator and addressee. Equally remarkable in Naphtalene is Mamdouh’s disregard for a traditional organic plot. Juxtaposing a series of tableaux or scenes in the Brechtian fashion is a stylistic feature of Mamdouh’s fiction. She leaves the weaving of the whole to the intelligence of the reader.
Al-Wala‘ (Craving) opens with a letter by the protagonist Huda (as if the young Huda of Naphtalene were continuing her trajectory), addressed to an Iraqi woman friend Buthaina (a hardly concealed figure of Mamdouh’s good friend, the Iraqi woman writer Buthaina al-Nasiri, author of Final Night [2002]). The letter is drafted at Heathrow airport, while Huda is waiting for her husband’s arrival. Their son, Mazin, is waiting with her, but what makes the scene grotesque is that Mus‘ab, Huda’s husband and Mazin’s father, is coming to London with a new wife, Widad. What is even more disturbing is Huda’s desire for him nonetheless. Raja’ al-‘Alim, an impressive Saudi Arabian novelist, identified what she liked about this novel, namely the energy that it exudes, and pointed to the ambiguity at its heart. Resentment and craving are joined in the character of the protagonist (2006). The introduction to the French translation of the novel, written by the Algerian-French feminist Hélène Cixous, entitled “Femme Arabe en Grande-Bretagne” (Arab Woman in Great Britain) argues that in this novel we find the setting both “irakisé et désirakisé,” Iraqized and disIraqized, so to speak (2003). This remark joins that of al-‘Alim in pointing to the ambiguity; only Cixous raises it to the level of ambivalence and associates it with the figure of paronomasia—a kind of punning or rhetorical word play where something is both asserted and negated. The bed of Mus‘ab becomes the arena where the two wives, Huda and Widad, confront each other and compete.
In 2000, Mamdouh published her fourth novel, entitled Al-Ghulama (The Tomboy) (2000a). The title is both provocative and indicative of Mamdouh’s further exploration of the richness of Arabic. She strives for the (un)familiar to the point of joining the opposites. In Arabic “ghulam” is a common word indicating a young boy or a lad. When the suffix “a” is added to the word, known in Arabic as ta’ marbuta, it becomes feminine. Thus, we say, for example, jamil for a handsome man and jamila for a handsome woman. So to add a
specifically feminine suffix to ghulam, a male by definition, is to challenge the boundaries between the genders. But it is more than crossing gender barriers in a wordplay. It is the artistic creation of ambiguities that reject binary opposition. In Arabic rhetoric, the suffix “a,” associated with the feminine, is occasionally added to a masculine adjective to indicate exaggeration. Thus one can say ‘allam of an erudite male, and by adding the suffix “a”—thus becoming ‘allama—we indicate a polymath. For an educated Arab reader, sensitive to the nuances of the language, Al-Ghulama stands for both gender accentuation (super male) and gender deconstruction (male-female). Furthermore, the title Al-Ghulama comes from the triliteral root (gha’-lam-mim) that refers to being in heat or seized by a sensual desire or lust. Mamdouh mobilizes the latent meaning of the radical and conflicting significance in the word-title to characterize the protagonist.