Hawwa 3,2_f5-f8_267-279 7/26/05 1:45 PM Page 267 BOOK REVIEWS MAJAJ, Lisa Suhair, SUNDERMAN, Paula W. and SALIBA, Therese, (eds.), Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels. Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East Series. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Pp. 287 with bibliography and index. Intersections’ primary concern involves the many facets of representation. Most basi- cally, this collection seeks to expand an anglophone audience’s exposure to Arab women writers. Additionally, each of the ten essays, including the historical overview that follows the editors’ introduction, shows a particular concern over how Orientalist discourses have perpetually exoticized and eroticized Arab women and/or over how these women writers engage and challenge such images, as well as images generated within their unique cultural, historical, and geographical realities, in their own writing. In their introduction to the collection of essays on Arab women’s novels, the editors see the book as an example of the “increasing inclusion of and attention to Arab women writers [in the contexts of ] postcolonialism, transnationalism, global feminism, and political resistance” (p. xviii). Further, the editors view the collected essays’ attempts “to establish new points of intersection within transna- tional spaces—between Arab women from different countries, between Arab women and Arab men, between Arab writers and English-speaking readers, between writ- ers and critics, and among literary and historical and political contexts” as their book’s unique contribution to the ongoing conversation (p. xxx). Encompassing women writers from Egypt, Algeria, Palestine, and Lebanon, the collected essays share the objective of introducing contemporary writers to an anglophone audience; that is, the authors discussed write predominantly in French and/or Arabic, and English translations of their works are just now becoming more widely available. After an overview essay by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, enti- tled “Modernist Arab Women Writers: A Historical Overview,” each essay focuses on a single author: Amal Amireh writes on Nawal El Sadaawi; Magda M. Al- Nowaihi on Salwa Bakr; Mary N. Layoun on Andrée Chedid; Barbara Harlow on Sahar Khalifeh; Therese Saliba on Liana Badr; Mona Fayad on Hoda Barakat; Nada Elia on Assia Djebar; Lisa Suhair Majaj on Etel Adnan; and Sabah Ghandour writes on Hanan al-Shaykh. All of these essays provide a considered and well- contextualized argument regarding their authors’ oeuvre. In doing so, many of these essays also mark the limits of contemporary Western literary/critical dis- course. For instance, Elia’s piece on Djebar, “The Fourth Language; Subaltern Expression in Djebar’s Fantasia,” which argues for the existence of a fourth lan- guage beyond the colonizer’s tongue, French, and the patriarchal languages of Arabic and Berber, identifies the colonialist blind spots in écriture feminine. Similarly, Saliba’s essay, “A Country Beyond Reach: Liana Badr’s Writings of the Palestinian Diaspora,” argues that one of the values of Badr’s prose is that it “do[es] not © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 HAWWA 3, 2 Also available online – www.brill.nl Hawwa 3,2_f5-f8_267-279 7/26/05 1:45 PM Page 268 268 conform neatly to existing literary theories on women, war, and nationalist struggle” insofar as it conjoins feminism and Palestinian (trans)nationalism (p. 138). Three headings organize the book, drawing together three essays in each group (the groupings of three correspond to my list of contributors, excluding the overview): “Gender and Community,” “Narrating the Nation,” and “Embodied Voices and Histories.” These are not hard and fast categorizations, however. Indeed, the edi- tors invite readers to consider other possible organizing principles. Such alterna- tives could include “Women’s Rights as Human Rights,” “Palestinian Partition and Diaspora,” “The Lebanese Civil War,” and “Language and Audience.” Another alternative heading, “Translating Genres,” would be of particular interest to lit- erary scholars looking to integrate Arab women writers in a variety of courses, and, in the balance of this review, I want to trace the possibilities that such a categorization may hold. To the extent that any mention is made of the politics of translation, many of the essays look at the issue of translation quite literally, as they should. They note when texts were translated from their original Arabic or French into English. For instance, Amireh’s essay, “Framing Nawal El Sadaawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World,” remarks that the shortening of time between original pub- lication in Arabic and translation into English of El Sadaawi’s work indicates her growing popularity in the English-speaking world (p. 36). Or, as in the case of Majaj’s essay, “Voice, Representation, and Resistance: Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose,” in which she notes that Adnan has recently started to write in English after building her career writing in French and “painting” in Arabic (p. 209), some of these critics discuss translation as a matter of the language of composition. Elia’s focus on French in Djebar’s writings presents, perhaps, the most extended exam- ination of the politics of translation through an emphasis on bilingualism. This latter sense of translation as a matter of composition fits into the alter- native heading of “Translating Genres” most neatly. Speaking in general terms about whether literature can be a form of resistance, Majaj states, [R]esistance texts use literary forms to expose specific social and political conditions, to suggest alternatives to these conditions, and to elicit respon- sive action from their readers. They provide counter-narratives through which subaltern voices may be heard or represented, and put forward alternative political perspectives. (p. 203) Counter-narratives, then, can encourage the translation of genre, an experimen- tation with form so that it more aptly suits the (counter-)narrative, location, and circumstances of the story being told. Various elements in this essay collection work together to illuminate how contemporary Arab women’s writing makes a practice of genre innovation, thereby “translating” forms as they work with (and through) languages already laden with bias. In the helpful overview essay, Jayyusi discusses four women—Mai Ziyada, Nazira Zeineddin, Durriyya Shafik, and Nazik al-Mala’ika—who have laid the founda- tion in the first half of the twentieth-century for the contemporary authors upon which the rest of the collection focuses. Al-Mala’ika’s career in particular serves as a departure point for the “Translating Genres” category as she, according to Jayyusi, along with Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, “liberated the Arabic poem from its centuries-old mold of the monorhyme and the two-hemistich form” by writing in.