Liyana Badr’s A Balcony over the Fakihani, Pillars of Salt, by Fadia Faqir, and A Woman of Five Seasons, by Leila Al-Atrash

Liyana Badr’s A Balcony over the Fakihani, Pillars of Salt, by Fadia Faqir, and A Woman of Five Seasons, by Leila Al-Atrash

In Liyana Badr’s novella, A Balcony over the Fakihani, the main character, Su’ad, meets and falls in love with a man named Umar, who towards the book’s end is killed in battle. What occurs between the meeting and the death constitutes the author’s attempt to process the environment in which she grew up. Similarly, Pillars of Salt, by Fadia Faqir, and A Woman of Five Seasons, Leila Al-Atrash, focus on and investigate women’s lives in the Arab world. At the very least, three issues are at work in these books. One string explores the oppressions and the joys, the perversities and the passions of Arab women. Another theme is Arab men’s behaviors and attitudes toward women. The final topic, which encompasses the other two, is the idea of literary form; that is, the particular ways in which the authors represent their experiences through writing. Taken together, these novels, in both shape and content, explore what it means to be a woman in an Arab, a man’s, world.

One early scene in A Balcony Over the Fakihani is emblematic of the novella as a whole, as well as of the novels of Faqir and Al-Atrash; it encapsulates the authors’ artistic approach to the handling of their lives, the hostilities they must endure, the roles of Arab men and women, and the different ways both act within their setting. To begin, Badr artfully sets the stage in an almost journalistic fashion, parodying a newspaper’s objective approach in the face of so much human tragedy: "May 1973—tank gun and machine gun fire on Shatila camp (Badr, 45). This crafty setup is part and parcel of the way in which the author handles her topic. Only through art can she comprehend and process these events. In this respect, "The sky was lit with green and red stars, and the thunder and lightening wasn’t real thunder and lightening, but bullets from machine guns and small arms."

In the midst of such fighting, Su’ad noticed "a white hair in the middle of her head. I couldn’t believe a baby’s hair could turn white" (46). Her disbelief is compounded when Im Hamdi sees the white hair and "cried out and wailed." Su’ad, in turn, is overcome by emotion. The two women hug and cry.