Fadia Faqir's Pillars of Salt and Leila al-Atrash's A Woman of Five Seasons The portrayal of the Arab woman has always been through several different perceptions. Some believe that these women are weak, dependant and victims of a hyper patriarchal tradition and culture. They live their lives as if caged from one man to another. First it is their father and brothers and then their husbands and sons. It is true that Arab women do live within patriarchal traditions and cultures but the same can be
all alike. None so obscure as the relationship between man and woman. It is especially intriguing to witness the compatibility of both especially in marriage. Using the three novels Pillars of Salt, by Fadia Faqir, A Woman of Five Seasons, by Leila Al-Atrash, and A Balcony over the Fakihani, by Liyana Badr one might begin to analyze the different relationships between men and women in Arab culture. While any relationship is uniquely different, these novels will aid in getting a better idea about Arab
reveal how strong Muslim women, or any woman for that matter can truly be. In Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt the main character experiences a transformation from a dutiful daughter to a strong, liberated woman after the death of her husband. During Leila Al-Atrash’s A Woman of Five Seasons another female protagonist experiences mental rebellion as she copes with conflicting emotions about the man she loves and the man she is supposed to love. Last, in Liyana Badr’s novella A Land of Rock and Thyme.
Gender Roles and Ideas The Male Character in Arab Women’s Novels: Often in literature authors, particularly men, are criticized for falsely or inaccurately portraying or "writing" women. This debate has been historically confined to male authors, but is on occasion reversed and female authors are criticized for inaccurately writing men. Although it may sound like a fair trade—or at least the beginnings of one in the world of critics—these situations are limited to primarily European and predominately
Arab Women and Education Whether it was the impoverished desert village, the war torn hills of Beirut, affluent Barqais, the jet set in London and Paris, or the enclosed lives of women in a harem in Morocco, the female characters in these novels all shared five common threads that dealt with the family and the search for identity. In my reading of five novels about Arab women from backgrounds and in situations as diverse as I thought possible, I was surprised to find this common thread running
and creativity in their writing. Woman novelists lead the reign of storytelling now just as they did right at the beginning. 'The first Arab novel was written by a woman, fifteen years before any Arab man tried his hand at this literary genre. Hush al Awaqib, by Zaynab Fawaz, was published in 1899.' For them, storytelling was a way of self-expression, and individualism. The intention is not to imply that it is gender difference itself that determines the nature of literary creation, on the contrary
Expression of Desires In Arabic Women’s Novels Picking an original and engaging topic that is able to span all five of the very different authors’ novels we examined this semester proved to be a difficult task. Though there are certainly similarities between each book and overlying themes that connect them, ultimately I didn’t want to get tied down into the shifty and unsafe territory of placing novels together solely because one, they are all written by women; or two, they all emerge out of
The Community of Female Voices in Arab Women Literature In her memoir, Dreams of Trespass, Fatima Mernissi remembers asking her grandmother Yasmina how one can discern a true story from a false one. The wise old woman, Yasmina, told her granddaughter to relax and not look at life in extreme polarities because "there are things which could be both [true and false] and things which could be neither" (Dreams, 61). "Words are like onions," Yasmina explained further and "the more skins you peel off
Alienation in the lives of Arab Women Alienation: al·ien·a·tion ( l y -n sh n, l - -) n. The act of alienating or the condition of being alienated; estrangement; isolation or dissociation. Alienation is a concept that is universal to all people of all cultures in the world and throughout all time periods. These feelings of alienation, in some form or another, have affected every human begin that has ever taken a breath and will until the race is extinct. It is these feelings of alienation
Self-Determination in Arab Society Since World War Two, much of the developing world has been in transition. One such idea that saw a re-birth was that of self-determination-- be it on the national level or on the personal level. Self-determination on a national level means the independence of a country; on a personal level, it is the determination of one own fate. This can be seen in various ways with our five women characters, Maha, Um Saad, Nadia, Yusra and Suad. In the forward of Daughters