Late Modern Arabic Literature

LATE MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE: GENDER AS CRUCIBLE OF CRISIS A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Khalid Hadeed August 2012 i © 2012 Khalid Hadeed ii Late Modern Arabic Literature: Gender as Crucible of Crisis Khalid Hadeed, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 This dissertation explores the relation between gender and crisis in the late modern phase of Arabic literature—specifically, from the late 1960s to the present. Working with a regional Arab context, I define crisis as an endemic situation of political paralysis and cultural stagnation, one historically connected to the Arab world’s failure to obtain the political freedom, economic independence, and social reform aspired to in anti-colonial nationalism. This dissertation focuses on literature that has developed out of three of the most salient crises since the late 1960s: the Israeli occupation of Palestine, sectarian strife in Lebanon, and the nexus between comprador capitalism and the police state in Egypt. The texts I read for this purpose are: from Palestine, the poems “Moans at the Permits Window” (1969) and “A Hurtful Wish” (1973) by Fadwa Tuqan, the poetic memoir The Siege (1982) by May al-Sayigh, the experimental novella All That’s Left to You (1966) by Ghassan Kanafani, and the sociological novel The Inheritance (1997) by Sahar Khalifeh; from Lebanon, Rashid al-Daif’s arguably “post-modern” novel Dear Mr Kawabata (1995) and Jabbur al-Duwayhi’s historical novel The Rain of June (2006); and from Egypt, Sonallah Ibrahim’s Kafkaesque novel The Committee (1981). My aim in reading these different literary treatments of crisis in a single framework of gender analysis is threefold: to call attention to gender as a critical dimension of historical continuity between the national and regional Arab contexts within which crisis unfolds; to present Arabic literature as a uniquely generative site for the imagining, and re-imagining, of the gender of crisis in the Arab world; and to suggest that the emergence of gender as a crucible of crisis—as opposed to an allegory of crisis—in Arabic literature is specific to the late modern period during which the selected texts were written. Given that my choice of primary texts is based on the extent of their thematic resonance with the proposed argument, the dissertation should not be read as a literary-historical survey. However, in light of the regional context within which gender appears as a crucible of crisis, I contend that my argument has strong implications for Arabic literary history. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Khalid Hadeed was born in Kuwait, where he attended the Bayan Bilingual School. He holds a B.A. in Economics and Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. His research interests lie primarily in modern Arabic literature, post-colonial Anglophone literature, gender and sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory. He has written about homosexuality in modern Arabic literature, feminist inter-subjectivity in Anglophone women’s modernism, and queerness as an analytic framework in Palestinian and Israeli cinema. He has also contributed several translations between Arabic, English, and French to the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, the Sharjah Art Foundation, and ArteEast, New York. iii DEDICATION To Liliane Weissberg, who enticed me into Comparative Literature with her incomparable magic iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisory committee members, Profs. Deborah Starr, Shawkat Toorawa, and Natalie Melas, for their careful guidance during the dissertation writing process and their constant support for my work; my parents, Waleed Hadeed and Dhiya al-Isa, for all the invaluable, un-requitable gifts they’ve given me throughout my life; my sisters Reem, Hanan, and Noorah Hadeed, for cheering me on along the way; my aunt Julie Hadeed, for her faith in my potential and her ardent encouragement; my aunt Zahra Hadeed, for generously taking the time to hunt for the Arabic texts I needed in Beirut; Ania Loomba and Kathleen Brown, for helping to mold my feminism and enabling my transition to graduate school; my cousin Cynthia Abdulelah, for being the most perceptive listener and compassionate confidante for me during the difficult times; and my friends Reem Fadda, Paolomi Merchant, Najwa al-Bishir, Namita Dharia, Krupa Shandilya, Sunayana Banerjee, Gaganpreet “Kaur” Sidhu, Beth Bouloukos, Ruth Lo, Caroline Ferraris-Besso, Paloma Yannakakis, Kavita Singh, Barrak Alzaid, William Skinner, Julie Brown, Roozbeh Dadvand, Fadi Odeh, Haitham Ennasr, and Nadia Awad, for bringing the best of human intelligence, beauty, and graciousness into my life. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 I. Embattled Nation: Gender in Palestinian Resistance Literature 25 1. Fadwa Tuqan and May al-Sayigh: Occupation, Invasion, 30 and the Feminization of National (Dis)honor 2. Fracturing the Nation: Ghassan Kanafani, Sahar Khalifeh, 55 and the Radical Rifts of Gender II. Revisiting Lebanon: Rashid al-Daif, Jabbur al-Duwayhi, and 92 the Making of Tribal/Sectarian Masculinity 1. Dear Mr Kawabata: Sectarianism and Secularism 97 via Male Homosocial Desire 2. The Rain of June: Manning the Borders with Blood 130 III. “Neopatriarchal” Egypt in Sonallah Ibrahim’s The Committee 170 Conclusion 241 References 245 vi Introduction In her treatise Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East since 1967 (2009), Samira Aghacy foregrounds masculinity as a pivotal network of social and symbolic relations that frames the experience of political crisis in post-1967 Arabic literature.1 Choosing to focus on masculinity as the arena on which the crises of Arab identity and agency unfold in the literature of this period, Aghacy does an important job of critiquing the male hegemony over politics as well as literary and cultural production. Taking typologies of masculinity as the organizing frame of her text, Aghacy examines literary representations of the oppressive masculinities lying on the continuum between civil society and the state; the dysfunctional masculinities of the intellectual and the freedom fighter, caught between lofty ideals of social reform and the paralyzing status quo; the patriarchal authoritarianism of the dictatorial state, with all its diverse mechanisms of political repression and persecution; and the social spaces where masculinity appears as a fragile construct riven with contradictions between ideology and reality, and subject to the same social and political hierarchies that marginalize women. In approaching masculinity as an internally differentiated, shifting, and historically contingent construct that complicates the polarized power binaries usually perceived as masculine vs. feminine, Aghacy makes an important departure from the critical scholarship associated with miriam cooke, which proposes that male and female writers follow distinctly different approaches in their representation of their respective social realities. In this schema, male writers engage social problems through the political rhetoric of the male-dominated public sphere, and present this rhetoric as a gender-neutral language exclusively capable of addressing the oppressive facets of the status quo. Female writers, on the other hand, tend to focus on domestic spaces and concerns in a manner that confounds the public/private distinction, and interweaves the hierarchies of gender and sexuality with the crises unfolding on 1 the public stage. In her book, Aghacy gives due attention to writings by men that engage the fragile and contradictory nature of masculinity, and the joint subjugation of men and women by the state, the class structure, and wars that have shaped the political geography of the Arab world from the late sixties to the present. In doing so, Aghacy complicates the masculine/feminine power binary, demonstrating the diversity and historical contingency of gender as both identity and relationality, as well as the progress that Arabic literature has made, in the post-1967 period, to register and express these malleable aspects of gender as they relate to crisis. In this dissertation, I argue that Arabic literature from the same historical period engaged by Aghacy sees an important shift in critical awareness, where gender, rather than being a mere symptom of the crises afflicting the Arab world, manifests as a matrix of social relations integral to the infrastructure of these crises. While my focus is not on typologies of masculinity, I take Aghacy’s lead in the following three respects. In the first place, I concur with the historical framework of Aghacy’s argument: like her, I identify the late sixties as the starting point of Arabic literature’s critical revision of the separation line between gender and crisis, the public and private spheres, and its growing awareness of patriarchy as a hierarchical structure that intersects with the hierarchies of class and political power, as well as the violence erupting on the national and regional stages. Moreover, I accept the periodization of crisis that Aghacy presents as the historical ground of her argument: “The post-1967 era has been punctuated with wars: the 1970 Black September War in Jordan, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Civil War in Lebanon, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the first and second Palestinian intifadas, and the first and second Gulf wars.”2 To this list one may add the failure of the Oslo “peace process” initiated in 1993 and the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.3 In the second place, as Aghacy does in her book, I will deal with “femininity and masculinity...as relational patterns that shift and 2 change in accordance with the social, economic, and political transformations in the area.”4 This approach is necessitated by my topic, since it is less concerned with the masculinity of politics than with the diverse ways in which gender, as a compulsory matrix of relations, maneuvers both masculinity and femininity in the direction of creating, and perpetuating, the crises that constrain political agency and cultural growth.

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