Women's and Gender Studies 36 Amherst College, Spring 1992 Chapin 204 Mondays, 2:00-4:00 Lisa Majaj Office: Infirmary 205 Office Hours: Monday 4:00-6:00 and by appt. Arab Women's Literature: Female Voices, Feminist Negotiations This course explores Arab women's experiences and expression through an examination of writing by Arab women from the 1860s to the present. After beginning with a discussion of the problematics of discussing Arab women within a western frame of reference, we will address the historical development of Arab feminism, reading fiction, poetry, memoirs and polemical pieces. Subsequently, we will read contemporary novels by Egyptian, Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, and Algerian women writers. Discussion will focus on the ways in which Arab women have articulated their subjectivity, challenged or reformulated societal and familial roles, negotiated tradition, responded to political and cultural exigencies, and formulated a literary and feminist aesthetic. Books (available at the Jeffery Amherst Bookshop) Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (abbreviated as OTG) Nawal el-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero Andree Chedid, From Sleep Unbound Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns Fadia Faqir, Nisanit Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose Leila Abouzeid, Year of the Elephant Fettouma Touati, Desperate Spring Xeroxes (*) to be distributed in class Schedule of Readings Jan. 27 Introduction Feb. 3 Feminist Problematics *Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, 51-80. *Leila Ahmed, ÒWestern Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem," Feminist Studies 8.3 (1982): 521-534. *Laura Nader, "Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women," Cultural Dynamics 11.3 (1989): 323-335. *Marnia Lazreg, "Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria." Feminist Studies 14, No. 1 (Spring 188): 81-107. *Leila Ahmed, "Arab Culture and Writing Women's Bodies." Feminist Issues 9.1 (Spring 1989): 41-55. *Suad Joseph, "Feminization, Familism, Self and Politics," Arab Women in the Field, Ed. Soraya Altorki and Camillia Fawzi El-Solh, 25-47. Feb. 10 Early Arab Feminist Voices Opening the Gates [OTG], Introduction (3-20). *Margot Badran, Dual Liberation: Feminism and Nationalism in Egypt, 1870s-1925." Feminist Issues, Spring 1988 (15-34). Literature and Literacy Warda al-Yaziji, "Warda al-Turk" OTG 21-22 May Ziyada, "Warda al-Yaziji" OTG 239-243 Hind Nawfal, "Dawn of the Arabic Women's Press" OTG 215-219 Nabawiya Musa, "Effect of Books" OTG 257-262 Men, Women, and the Family Aisha al-Taimuriya, "Results" OTG 125-128 "Family Reform" OTG 129-133 Zainab Fawwaz, "Fair and Equal Treatment" OTG 220-226 Saiza Nabarawi, "Double Standard" OTG 279-281 Nabawiya Musa, "Differences" OTG 263-269 Bahithat al-Badiya, "Bad Deeds of Men: Injustice" OTG 134-136 Fatima Mernissi, "Who's Cleverer, Man or Woman?" OTG 315-327 Activism Bahithat al-Badiya, "Lecture" OTG 227-238 Nazira Zain al-Din, "Unveiling and Veiling" OTG 270-276 "The Young Woman and the Shaikhs" OTG 277-278 Huda Shaarawi, "Pan-Arab Feminism," OTG 337-340 Zahiya Dughan, "Arab Women's Intellectual Heritage" OTG 341-342 Inji Aflatun, "We Egyptian Women" OTG 343-351 Duriya Shaafiq, "Islam and the Constitutional Rights of Women" OTG 352-356. Feb. 17 Women in Familial Relationships *Alifa Rifaat, "Bahiyah's Eyes" Daughters Huda Shaarawi, "Farewell, Bethrothal, Wedding," OTG 41-48 Qut al Qulub, "The Elopement and the Impossible Joy" OTG 244-256 Zainaba, "Lecture" OTG 63-71 Alifa Rifaat, "Who'll be the Man?" OTG 72-77 Emily Nasrallah, "September Birds" OTG 144-154 Nawal al-Saadawi, "Eyes" OTG 203-214 Khairiya Saqqaf, "I Saw Her and That's Enough" OTG 84-89 "In a Contemporary House" OTG 90-91 Mothers Fadhma Amrouche, "My Mother" OTG 186-190 Sufi Abdallah, "Eight Eyes" OTG 332-336 Shirley Saad, "Amina" OTG 49-53 Samira Azzam, "The Protected One" OTG 54-56 Wives Wadida Wassef, "Hassan's Wives" OTG 92-101 Noha Radwan, "The Silk Bands" OTG 119-124 Zoubeida Bittari, "The Voice of Happiness" OTG 282-295 Ulfa Idelbi, "Seventy Years Later" 57-62 *Alifa Rifaat, "Distant View of a Minaret *Layla Ba'albakki, "Space Ship of Tenderness" Sisters Alifa Rifaat, "Honour" OTG 78-83 May Muzaffar, "Personal Papers" OTG 180-185 Samar Attar, "Rima" OTG 191-202 Rebellion Hanan al-Shaikh, "A Girl Called Apple" OTG 155-159 Ihsan Assal, "The House of Obedience" OTG 160-167 Accad, "The Excised," OTG 168-173 Andree Chedid, "The House of Arrest" OTG 174-179 Feb. 24 Literature and the Public Sphere Writers Nadia Tueni, "Who are you, Claire Gebeyli?" OTG 23-25 Fadwa Tuqan, "Difficult Journey" OTG 26-40 Etel Adnan, "Growing Up to be a Woman Writer" OTG 3-20 Nawal al-Saadawi, "Reflections of a Feminist" OTG 394-404 Assia Djebar, "Introd. to al-SaadawiÕs Ferdaous" OTG 386-393 War, Nationalism, Feminism Nadia Guendouz, "People" OTG 102 Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas "Women, Nationalism and Religion in the Algerian Struggle" OTG 104-114 * Daisy Al-Amir, "The Aunt of Rafiq" Women and the Family in the Middle East , 209-214. Nuha Samara, "Two Faces, One Woman" OTG 304-313 Huda Naamani, From "Tumbling on the Snow" OTG 314-316 * Yolla Polity Sharara, "Women and Politics in Lebanon," Forbidden Agendas , Khamsin Anthology, 157-168. Activism Farida Benlyazid, "The Gate of Heaven is Open" OTG 296-303 Ghada Samman, "Our Constitution" OTG 137-143 Chaibia, "My Life" OTG 328-331 Amina Said, "Feast of Unveiling" OTG 357-362 "Why, Reverend Sheikh?" OTG 363-365 Nahid Toubia, "Challenges Facing Young Women in the Twentieth Century" OTG 366-371 Group of Egyptian Women, "Legal Rights" OTG 372-374 Amatalrauf al-Sharki, "An Unveiled Voice" OTG 375-385 *Aminah al- Said, "The Arab Woman and the Challenge of Society" Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak, Ed. Elizabeth Fernea and Basima Bezirgan, 373-390. *Ghadah al-Samman, "The Sexual Revolution and the Total Revolution" Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak, 391-399. March 2 Nawal al-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero (Egyptian) March 9 Andree Chedid, From Sleep Unbound (Egyptian) March 16 Spring break March 23 Sahar Kahlifeh, Wild Thorns (Palestinian) March 30 Fadia Faqir, Nisanit (Jordanian) Short paper due April 6 Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose (Lebanese) April 13 Film: Razor's Edge Term paper proposal due April 20 Year of the Elephant (Moroccan) April 27 Desperate Spring (Algerian) May 4 Retrospective Portfolio and essay due May 11 Term paper due Course Requirements: 1. Regular and prepared class participation. The class will be conducted as a seminar in which each person assumes responsibility for sustaining class discussion; it is, therefore, crucial that you come to class having read and thought about the assigned texts. Absences will lower your grade. 2. Written responses to assigned readings. A. Ten response papers (1-3 pages), responding to weekly readings. These need not be formal papers, but should demonstrate thought and some planning. Typing is not required but is greatly appreciated. Turn in one per week, skipping whichever three weeks you like. (Or choose to write every week, for extra credit.) I may require you to write on particular texts. These will not be graded during the term, but must be turned in on the day on which the text is discussed. B. Portfolio. At the end of the term, resubmit your responses in a portfolio together with an essay (5-6 pages) reflecting on the development of your ideas throughout the term: the preoccupations you notice in looking back at your response papers; how your ideas have changed; how individual texts have contributed to your thinking; how you position yourself with regard to issues raised in the class; etc. Due May 4. 3. In-class presentation. Working in groups, choose one novel, introduce background information on it (history of the country, biography of the author, etc.), and initiate/guide discussion of the text. To this end, generate a list of questions and issues for the class to focus on. 4. Short (5-6 pages) paper. This should be a textual analysis of one or more of the readings on the syllabus, and may be related to your presentation. Due March 30. If you are giving a presentation that week, or if you have a strong desire to write on Nisanit (the reading for that week) the due date is one week later. 5. Term paper (10-15 pages). Proposal (one paragraph description of your topic) due April 13. Paper due May 11. Grading: 10% attendance and participation; 30% journals and portfolio; 10% presentation; 20% short paper; 30% long paper. __________________________________________________________ Lisa Suhair Majaj. "Female Voices, Feminist Negotiations: An Experience Teaching Arab Women's Literature." In Association for Middle East Women's Studies Newsletter, Vol. VII, No. 3 (September 1992): 3-7. How does one teach Arab women's literature? Questions arise in considering any group of women's texts of a specific cultural or national origin: should emphasis be placed upon the cultural context of the literature, upon gender issues, upon literary elements? What are the implications of grouping texts by gender and by culture? Are there universal feminist principles which one can apply to women's texts cross-culturally? Teaching Arab women's literature is fraught with an additional tension, however, one which imbues most discussions of the Middle East, and of Middle Eastern women in particular, in a western -1 context--the need to challenge the free-floating orientalist "knowledge" which predetermines popular perceptions of the Middle East, without subverting the critical analysis of Arab societies which writers undertake. While to emphasize the element of feminist critique in Arab women's writing may appear to buttress pervasive stereotypes of Middle Eastern women, to ignore this element distorts Arab women's writing. The complexity of the undertaking of teaching Arab women's literature became evident to me through the array of theoretical issues and pragmatic concerns which arose last spring when I taught a seminar entitled "Arab Women's Literature: Female Voices, Feminist Negotiations," offered through the Women's and Gender Studies program at Amherst College. The course was intended both to explore the history of Arab feminism and to situate contemporary fiction by Arab women within this context, interrogating the ways in which Arab women have articulated their subjectivity, negotiated tradition, challenged and reformulated societal and familial roles, responded to political and cultural exigencies, and formulated a literary and feminist aesthetic. Required texts included Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke's Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, Nawal el-Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero, Andree Chedid's From Sleep Unbound, Sahar Khalifeh's Wild Thorns, Fadia Faqir's Nisanit, Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose, Leila Abouzeid's Year of the Elephant, and Fettouma Touati's Desperate Spring. In addition, we viewed and discussed the film The Razor's Edge, directed by Jocelyn Saab, and students attended an Arab women's film festival shown simultaneously at Amherst and Smith Colleges. Assignments included a short literary analysis of one of the assigned texts; a longer paper, either literary analysis or a research paper, on a topic of the student's choosing; an in-class presentation on one of the assigned texts, providing pertinent historical and cultural information and initiating discussion of the text; ten journal responses to weekly readings; and a final short essay reflecting on the student's responses and development of ideas throughout the term. Because I could not be sure that students would have background in Middle Eastern studies, I had to be particularly careful about the decisions I made regarding the aims and assumptions of the course. In teaching this literature to students who would probably know little about the culture, history, and politics of the Middle East, and who would undoubtedly bring with them a host of preconceived ideas about women in the Arab world, how should the texts be situated? Was the purpose of the course to ground students in Middle Eastern gender relations and the role of women in Islam? How much history and politics should be formally incorporated into the structure of the course in order to enable students to read this literature effectively? Was it possible, or even desirable to speak of a "representative" Arab culture crossing national boundaries? If so, did these texts offer an adequate depiction of this culture, or were supplementary materials were needed? The necessity for background information seemed clear in order to ensure that students did not either assimilate these texts into their own cultural terms, interpreting them through "western" frames of reference, or conceptualize them as exotic, different, totally "other," and as such unknowable and uninterpretable. But to give the entire semester over to the concerns of context would be to treat literature as merely a source of cultural information, a move which would both reify the notion of culture and deny Arab women writers the careful textual analysis through which we interpret other kinds of literature. The tension between the conflicting demands of text and context arose not only in terms of what readings to provide, and how to discuss these readings, but also in terms of how to structure the course. Because I was using an anthology with a wide variety of readings, spanning a century and eleven countries, as well as novels from six different countries, a number of organizational strategies were possible, each with significant implications for interpretation and contextualization. The possibilities included organization by geographical, chronological, and thematic categories. To group writings by authors of different nationalities under common thematic concerns would make it possible to establish cross-national connections, and to discuss issues such as the relationship of feminism and nationalism comparatively. However, such a strategy would blur geographical and historical specificity, and would run the risk of homogenizing Arab culture. To arrange readings by the author's country of origin would make possible greater depth of focus, through which more attention could be given to the historical specificity of each text, but would make it more difficult to discuss thematic and historical connections across national boundaries. And to arrange texts chronologically would result in narrative coherence, but would sacrifice the complexity of thematic connections, and would blur the specificity of cultural and geographical contexts. My solution was to have students begin by reading anthology selections grouped under a variety of chronological and thematic categories, and then move to a country-by-country consideration of novels. -2 Margot Badran's article "Dual Liberation: Feminism and Nationalism in Egypt, 1870s-1925" -3 provided historical background to the rise of Arab feminism during our discussion of selections from Opening the Gates, and I filled in cultural and historical information as necessary. Each novel was prefaced by a student presentation on the historical and biographical context of novel and author. Readings from Opening the Gates were organized into sections on "early Arab feminist voices," with readings arranged chronologically; on "women in familial relationships," with readings grouped under specific familial roles; and on "literature and the public sphere," with readings arranged thematically. Novels were grouped geographically: Woman at Point Zero and From Sleep Unbound, both set in Egypt, were read in tandem, as were Wild Thorns and Nisanit, both of which address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; Sitt Marie Rose, about the Lebanese civil war, was paired with the film Razor's Edge, shot in war-torn Lebanon; and the course concluded with the North African novels Year of the Elephant (Moroccan) and Desperate Spring (Algerian). This arrangement made it possible to focus on thematic links between the novels within a particular geographical setting: for instance, the relationship between class and feminism, the possibilities of love, and the uses of violence in Woman at Point Zero and From Sleep Unbound; the relationship of gender issues to nationalism and the possibilities of "dual liberation" in Wild Thorns and Nisanit; the connections between war and sexuality in Sitt Marie Rose and the Razor's Edge; the negotiation of religion and tradition in the aftermath of revolution in Year of the Elephant and Desperate Spring. Although this structure made it possible to introduce, through the anthology readings, a wide variety of themes which were then taken up in greater depth in discussions of the novels, the grouping of so many short pieces at the beginning of the course made it difficult in practice to look at more than a few of them in depth. A more effective strategy might have been to begin with an historical introduction to Arab feminism through a selection of texts from Opening the Gates, but then to focus on individual countries, pairing novels with anthology readings, and delineating a thematic progression which would coincide with some depth of historical and geographical focus. A more systematic incorporation of historical material through assigned readings instead of, or in addition to, student presentations, as well as an introduction to the cultural and religious tenets of Islam at the beginning of the term, would also have been helpful. At the outset of the course I asked students to jot down the images-- stereotypes from the general culture as well as their own impressions-- which came to mind when they thought of Arab women. The list they generated was depressingly familiar, characterizing Arab women as passive, veiled, uneducated, secluded, oppressed. However, some positive themes emerged as well: students noted women's active participation in the Algerian revolution, Arab women's communal solidarity, the maintenance of strong familial ties, the connection to a tradition of poetry. Moreover, most students seemed quite conscious of the limitations of their own knowledge and of western depictions of the Arab world. Willing to question their own received ideas from the start, throughout the term they were quick to grant Arab women a complexity which stereotypes could not render. It was interesting to note that the difficulties I encountered in organizing the readings from Opening the Gate into appropriate groupings actually served to highlight the inadequacies of the categories through which Arab women are usually viewed. When I asked students to comment on the usefulness of grouping anthology readings by women's familial roles--an organization which I wished to problematize--they observed that such labelling could do injustice to the scope and complexity of the texts, by implying that Arab women's identities are delineated solely by traditional relationships to men and to the family. The limitations of this method of organization thus demonstrated precisely the inadequacies of stereotypical categories which I had hoped discussion of the literature would suggest. Before taking up the primary texts of the course, students read and discussed a set of essays by Chandra Mohanty -4, Leila Ahmed -5, Laura Nader -6, Marnia Lazreg -7, and Suad Joseph -8, presented under the subtitle "Feminist Problematics." Discussion of these essays was intended to focus attention on the theoretical implications of the study of Arab women's writing from an American perspective, and to suggest entry points into the context of Arab women's writing. The essays raised important questions about the ways in which eastern and western perspectives interact in the study of Middle Eastern women; the issues they addressed helped students to articulate their own questions and concerns, and to become alert to the specificity of their own perspectives. The questions posed during that class session continued to arise throughout the term. What does it mean to talk about feminism in a cross-cultural context? Are there commonalities of gender which make women's experiences recognizable regardless of cultural location? What are the meeting points and divergences of Arab feminism(s) and American feminism(s)? What assumptions do western readers bring to the exploration of Arab women's subjectivity, and how can these be destabilized in order that the texts may speak beyond the limitations of our own location? How does one escape the ethnocentric implications of assuming the west as a standard if Arab feminism is defined in implicit opposition to western feminism? Is identity conceptualized differently in the east and in the west, and if so, with what implications for feminist articulation, and for interchanges between Arab and American women? How is the "we" assumed in classroom dialogue constructed, and how does this affect the interpretation of texts? Throughout, I assumed that the deconstruction of stereotypes and assumptions about Arab women would need to take place simultaneously with the process of construction--of building up a body of knowledge about Arab women which would respond to and challenge these stereotypes. I wished to question the superimposition of western assumptions onto Arab women's texts, but also to problematize the notion of discrete cultures, positing not mutually exclusive worlds, nor a homogenous unity, but rather spheres of interaction and mutual comprehensibility. Although I attempted to pay careful attention to questions of location and definition, I made the significant error of failing to begin with an interrogation of feminism per se. I asked students to think about the ways in which Arab writers articulated feminist concerns, the ways in which the feminism of these writers differed from or resembled American feminism, and the ways in which the search for a feminist subtext might distort a text by superimposing on it a reader's desire; but I did not begin by eliciting the students' understanding of feminism, an error which became noticeable when they expressed discomfort with the definition of feminism offered by Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke in Opening the Gates, but could not agree on an alternative definition. I discovered that my students, all but one of whom were women, with some exceptions were not particularly knowledgeable about American feminism. In fact, like so many young women today, whose understanding of feminism is based upon the media representation of our so-called "postfeminist" era, most seemed to view feminism through its most politicized and controversial representations, and were reluctant to call themselves feminist; their sensitivity to stereotypes of Arab women did not prevent them from accepting stereotypes of feminism put forth in the general media. However, one student who rejected identification with feminism at the start of the course credited Arab women's literature for her increased understanding of her own identity in feminist terms at the end of the semester--a welcome reversal of the usual accreditation of feminist inspiration to the west. In her final reflective essay this student wrote, "One of the most valuable results of my participation in this class has been my ability to articulate a definition of feminism... Because of our discussion of Arab women, I have realized that it is very important that I integrate my 'rational,' academic, day-to-day life with my desires to manifest my strength as a woman... I finish the class feeling more articulate and aware of the experiences of Arab women, their expression in literature, Arab feminisms, Western feminisms, and especially my own feminism." Her comments suggest that reading Arab women's literature is not merely an excercise in cultural diversification, but may be a way of addressing issues of personal relevance to American students. This issue of personal relevance is one with particular significance for the project of teaching texts whose cultural references are far from students' usual contexts. In order to engage with the literature at a meaningful level, and to avoid objectifying Arab women as exotic "others," some degree of personal connection to the text is clearly desirable. To achieve this connection may require considerable attention to the contextualization of readings. When my students read Sahar Khalifeh's Wild Thorns, for instance, they expressed an almost unanimous sense of alienation from the text, stemming largely from their unfamiliarity with the historical and political context of this novel. When we read Fadia Faqir's Nisanit, after having spent a week on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, they expressed a good deal more comfort with that text, and with the historical and political issues as a whole. I suspect, too, that they preferred Nisanit because the narrative encompasses a clearly gendered voice much more directly than does Wild Thorns, which students had difficulty interpreting as a gendered text. In the absence of familiarity with the political exigencies which inform both texts, the perspective of a girl growing toward adulthood offered a point of entry which, despite its cultural specificity, was accessible to my students. In addition, the more intricate literary structure of Nisanit may have challenged their interpretive skills as readers in ways that reassured them of their literary competence, a reassurance which the necessity of political understanding implicit in Wild Thorns would not have provided. However, the relationship of students' personal identification with the text to their reading of it was not always straightforward. Student responses to Year of the Elephant and Desperate Spring in particular offered an interesting interrogation of the importance of personal relevance to meaningful interpretation. Students seemed to experience Year of the Elephant at somewhat of a remove, both because of its particular emphasis upon Islam (this was one point at which the desirability of addressing Islam as a cultural and religious system at the outset of the course became particularly apparent) and because of what many regarded as the unconvincing denouement of the narrator's rebellion through religious acceptance of her fate. However, although most could not identify in any direct way with the text, students were struck by the depth of religious faith it encompassed, and by its articulation of spirituality. Some saw the text as illustrating the dangers of understanding feminism in purely American terms, and considered it a productive challenge to their assumptions about feminism. As one student observed, "...perhaps this story taught me more about the politics of identity than any other... Zahra [the narrator] taught me that only the individual can define her resistance, and that in fact it is the right to define oneself and one's actions that is the impetus of resistance." This sensitive response to Year of the Elephant made me particularly interested to see their response to Desperate Spring, a text which seemed to me somewhat problematic in its concluding attribution to Islam of a generalized oppression of women, a charge not substantiated within the body of the text. I wondered whether they would be critical of Touati's rejection of Islam, judging this, and the liminal sense of identity depicted through her characters' torn identification with Algeria and France, as symptomatic of the uneasy negotiation of cultural identification in the aftermath of colonialism. What I found was that students, instead of being critical, identified with Desperate Spring in very personal ways. Touati's focus on the emotional, sexual, educational, and professional desires of her female characters seemed to offer a familiarity and contemporaneity of tone with which they could identify, a tone which narratives rooted more concretely in an observant Islamic context and in the politics of national struggles did not offer. Moreover, it seems that the ability of the students to relate on a personal, emotional level to the text in some ways made them less critical readers, certainly less attuned to the problematic elements of Tuati's text than their previous responses would have suggested. I wonder, therefore, whether it is necessary, in teaching Middle Eastern women's literature to American students, to search always for texts with which students can identify on a personal level. It seems to me that while the ability to engage emotionally with the text lessens the cultural gap in ways that are highly significant to understanding, an overly-enthusiastic identication leads to the problem which Chandra Mohanty discusses, of assuming a global "sisterhood" which homogenizes women as a group across classes and cultures, prior to the process of analysis. -9 Such an assumption both elides the material differences between Arab and American women, and obscures the ways in which Arab writers can themselves engage in orientalist representations of their societies. It is also true, however, that failure to establish points of contact between east and west results in what Marnia Lazreg decries as a "split vision of the world that relegates non-Western women to a residual category." -10 "The point, as Lazreg notes, "is neither to subsume other women under one's own experience nor to uphold a separate truth for them. Rather, it is to allow them to be while recognizing that what they are is just as meaningful, valid, and comprehensible as what 'we' are." -11 To do justice to my students, I must emphasize both their sensitivity to their culturally situated perspectives and the generosity of their responses: self-conscious about the ways in which they negotiated the unfamiliarity of the course material, they offered responses which were consistently careful, thoughtful, and insightful. Their final reflective essays offer rewarding glimpses into their engagement with Arab women's literature over the course of the term. For instance, one student observed, "I find it evident in my response papers that I privilege the 'female' over the 'Arab' character of the texts... Along these same lines I remark that my analyses privilege the personal over the political in these writings, the individual emotions and interpersonal relations over the broader political and historical events and discussions which I recognize as so often central components of the texts." As an American woman reading Arab women's texts, this student looked to the commonality of gender, the comprehensibility of individual experience, for access to texts whose political and historical points of reference were foreign to her. But granting the power of literature to speak across the barriers of history and culture, she continued, "the texts have presented themselves to me as partially-graspable examples of creative expression, beyond me, accessible to me now only in certain--perhaps predictable--ways, but nevertheless works of writing, generous in the description and the insight they offer even me on the other side of the world." The extent to which the readings challenged students' received notions, granting them access to other ways of seeing--and listening to--Arab women, was a dominant theme throughout their final essays. In the words of another student, "Like most Westerners I held a monolithic image of the Arab woman-- a black-shrouded figure, passive, mysterious, and above all silent...As the many stories, poems, articles and novels of Arab women have made clear to me, ...'The Arab World' is not exotic, primitive, or mysterious but a complex of human realities, sometimes familiar, sometimes not. //As for the notion of the silent monolithic Woman, inside this violent monolithic World, I now wonder whether she resides in the East or the West, seeing as how she is a figure of the Western imagination, and nowhere to be found in Arab women's literature... I have found myself transformed through my 'encounter' with Arab women's literature. Through their resistance to my definitions, their refusal to stay within my ideas of their identity, I found myself developing a more subtle and intricate appreciation of 'self-determination.'" Whatever the limitations of this course--and there were many--the experience of transformation which this student and others refer to suggests that the voices of Arab women speak across both historical and cultural divides, claiming relevance in the lives of American students today. 1. Despite the inadequacy of terms such as "western" and "eastern", this aryilce will employ these terms for lack of viable alternatives. 2. I would like to thank Miriam Cooke for her generosity in sharing the syllabus for her cousre "Women in Arab Literature"with me; this was extremely helpful when I was formulating my own syllabus. I would like to thank Selma Botman, Carolyn Fluehr-Loban, Azizah al-Hibri, Pauline Kaldas and Marnia Lazreg for sharing syllabi from related courses and other materials with me. 3. Margot Badran. "Duel Liberation: Feminism and Nationalism in Egypt, 1870's- 1925." Feminist Issues, Spring 1988 (15-34). 4. Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991): 51-80. 5. Leila Ahmed, "Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem," Feminist Studies 8.3 (1982): 521-534, Also "Arab CUlture and Writing Women's Bodies," Feminist Issues 9.1 (Spring 1989): 41-55. 6. Laura Nader, "Orientalism, Occidentalism and Control of Women," Cultural Dynamics 11.3 (1989): 323-335. 7. Marnia Lazreg, "Feminsim and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria," Feminism Studies 14, No. 1 (Spring 1988): 81-107. 8. Suad Joseph, "Feminization, Familism, Self and Politics," In Arab Women in the Field, Ed. Soraya Altorki and Camillia Fawzi El-Solh, 25-47. 9. Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes," p. 56. 10. Lazreg, "Feminism and Difference," p. 100. 11. Lazreg, p. 99.