Miriam Cooke

A collection of Arab feminist writing, from the 1920s through the 1980s. I rarely enjoy translated works (the language so often feels stilted and unnatural), and sadly, these were no exception. There were a couple pieces I liked:
--Wadida Wassef's "Hasan's Wives," a short story about a rowdy neighborhood family in Alexandria. A great deal of humor packed into a story that is also about what it was like to live back then--where aristocrats lived side-by-side with the people who raised their cattle.
--Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas's examination of women's roles in the Algerian revolution against French rule. Some quotes I loved from her piece: "Nor was she considered a fighter when she collected fuel or food for the fighters, or carried their guns, or guided them through the mountains. She was merely helping the men. Only the French army acknowledged her action by imprisoning and torturing her in concentration camps and killing her."
"We are caught between two legitimacies: belonging to our people or identifying with other oppressed women...We are not even aware of the differences between one Muslim country and another. Let Muslim women step out of their national ghettos. Let them see that the clitoridectomy practiced in Africa is unthinkable in Asia, that the veil worn in Arab countries is absent in sub-Saharan Africa, that none of these practices are based on religious precepts, but that religion everywhere backs such practices whenever they allow for greater control over women.
Let us dream of secular states. Let us dream of the separation of religion and state. Let us dream of the end of using nationalism to further oppress the already oppressed."

I didn't learn much from these works, but they were clearly very important when they were written. It's just that the arguments are so sad and basic: maybe women aren't less moral than men, perhaps we could teach women to read, perhaps women should not be legally beaten to death by their relatives. I don't know history very well, certainly not Middle Eastern or African history, but this book didn't teach me anything about that, either. Really, I think this book was a good reminder, but not something people should seek out.… (más)

In War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War, Miriam Cooke examines the work of a group of Lebanese women writers whom she calls the “Beirut Decentrists.” Working in a variety of media, including poetry, short stories, novels, and journalism, these women produced narratives treating their experiences of the Lebanese civil war.

Cooke compares the work produced by the Decentrists with similar works produced by their male counterparts and identifies significant differences in theme, tone, and intent, between the two groups. Men’s writing is political, analytical, and abstract; women’s writing is personal, descriptive, and concrete. Men glorify war; women deconstruct its mythology. Men write by virtue of their privilege in order to convey ideologies; women are compelled to write in order to share emotional experiences. Cooke argues that this difference is the result of the Decentrists’ marginalized position within Lebanese society (which is principally due to their gender). Women writers’ detachment from politics and ideologies gave them a superior perspective on the nature of the war. They presented the war as it really was, while male writers distorted the war, subjecting it to analysis or molding it to conform to heroic myths.

Although Cooke effectively highlights many of the themes and ideas that are reflected in women’s literature produced during the civil war, such as the fragmentation of society, the intrusion of war into daily life, denial of the war’s apparent irrationality, rejection of depersonalization of the participants, exploration of the non-ideological motives that led to participation in the conflict, and notions of responsibility and national identity, her work is not without shortcomings. The insistence on the singular importance of gender in shaping literary production causes Cooke to ignore the fact that nearly all Lebanese authors, regardless of their socio-economic or religious origins, were highly educated and that, like their male counterparts, many female authors worked as journalists prior to and during the war.

Although these factors do not mean that women did not have unique concerns or that they were not disadvantaged within Lebanese society, they do suggest that women were significantly closer to the epicenter of Lebanese political and cultural life than Cooke acknowledges. Glossing over these points allows Cooke to imagine the Decentrists as writing in isolation from their society, rather than in dialogue with it. Cooke reads their works as personal and non-ideological even when they contain explicitly political critiques. Cooke also does not acknowledge that the writings of many male authors address the same themes and employ the same techniques & motifs as their female counterparts.

They are also in part the result of her failure to engage with the works of male authors in the same way that she engages with the works of female authors – she looks at the works of 40 women writers, but only of 10 male writers. Her presentation of men’s work is somewhat unfair. She conducts an extensive analysis of a huge number of women’s poems, pamphlets, novels and short stories while her review of men’s literature is limited to brief examination of two novels - Elias Khoury’s The Little Mountain and Tawfiq Awaad’s A Death in Beirut (the second of which was written and set before the war broke out).

She engages in an extensive discussion of the myth of the impersonal sniper in the works of several female authors, which she contrasts to the depiction of the sniper in men’s works with a single sentence that refers only to unnamed “men’s writings” which are never named or discussed. Cooke either assumes that the subject of her reference is clear to everyone familiar with the relevant literature or that the difference is so obvious it needs no textual evidence to support it. She also has a weird issue with Palestinian women writers, who she says wrote like men (i.e., with an agenda).

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Cooke’s work is the way in which it posits a fundamental opposition between male and female notions of responsibility and citizenship and proceeds to ‘take sides’ in this imagined debate. Cooke accuses male authors of writing in order to exonerate themselves from responsibility for the war by locating and defining an ‘other’ who is to blame. Because men position themselves in the right, they assume that they have no role in ending the conflict. Responsibility is to the self, self-preservation becomes the highest goal, and emigration becomes the logical outcome for men. Women, by contrast, emphasize that everyone, even non-combatants, shares responsibility for the war. Because there is no right or wrong, everyone has a role in ending the conflict, and staying in Lebanon demonstrates one’s commitment to this task.

For Cooke, the distinction between remaining and leaving becomes central to not only to the identity of the Decentrists as a group, but to the identity of the Lebanese as a whole: “Those who stayed were the only ones who deserved to call themselves Lebanese; the only ones who deserved a share in the country’s reconstruction.” However, the issue of emigration was yet another issue that did not break down neatly along gender lines. Many of the Decentrist authors that Cooke considers actually left Lebanon, while their male counterparts remained in the country and continued to produce the kind of writing that she claims only women were capable of writing. Additionally, one wonders what right Cooke, who (to my knowledge) has not lived through the experience of civil war, has to judge anyone for leaving or staying in a war-torn country.

Although I sound really harsh in my criticism of Cooke, I actually thought this was a really interesting and valuable book. Cooke wrote this book at a time when the only Arab authors who were seriously studied were men. Her work, along with that of Evelyn Accad, gave a huge boost to the study of Arab women’s writings. It is definitely a product of its time and of a narrow application of feminist literary theory, but it is still a foundational text for the study of Lebanese women’s lit.… (más)