Mashriq
& Mahjar 3, no. 2 (2016), 177-179
ISSN 2169-4435
BRINDA J. MEHTA, Dissident Writings of Arab Women (London, New York: Routledge,
2014). Pp. 292. $145.00 cloth.
REVIEWED
BY IDIR OUAHES, University of Exeter; email: io212@exeter.ac.uk
This
volume represents a creative approach to writings on gender and politics in the
Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It attempts, largely successfully, to
build an analytical bridge between the study of the political (dis)organization
of the region, women's experiences and the (semi)fictional writings of a
selection of Middle Eastern authors. Such an approach encourages the
consideration of women's' experience that cut across spatial and territorial
delimitations. The book's introduction outlines the rich tradition of what
Brinda Mehta has termed dissident voices in the region; including from
non-women such as Franco-Algerian Albert Camus (2). Mehta understands
dissidence as a spontaneous and creative act fundamentally rooted in refusing
to comply with societal or state-led power. The authors she examines exercise
some degree of dissidence and there are a variety of common themes such as
violence against women (3-4). The scope of authors consulted and concepts
conjured are the result of what Mehta describes
as "femi-humanism," which she sees as an attempt to avoid the fragmentation
that has accompanied gendered analyses.
Chapter One provides a particularly interesting account of
how women's writings in Algeria have gendered its relationship with former
colonial power France. Mehta makes interesting insights into women writers by
going outside of the MENA context. For instance, she makes use of the ideas of
Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana American activist, to conceptualize the kind of
knowledge channeled by women writers in their incisive analysis. There are some
possible difficulties in the great scope of authors considered which leads the
analysis to overly depend on writers' perceptions. This not so much a fault as
a call for other studies to pick up the analysis here and to apply similar
concepts in sociological and historical research. The discussion of Madame Lafrance in this first chapter is
a case in point. Mehta introduces this concept as a personification of France's
civilizing mission (40-41) and a medium for the symbolic violence against women
as part of the conquest by the "civilizing" power.
While this provides an interesting supplement to historical
accounts of the violence by historians such as Benjamin Stora, who is cited by
Mehta, William Gallois and Benjamin Brower, it perhaps encourages an overly
static reading of the ways in which dominant discourses can be fixed as
binaries of dominant masculine colonial power and feminized oriental subjects.
To give a personal anecdote it is interesting to note that in one social
situation in the post-colonial period that this reviewer has encountered, the
words Madame Lafrance has become a
derisive phrase used to question French educated Algerian women's loyalty to
the nation. This demonstrates the fluidity of patriarchal, dominating,
discourses that can indeed mutate a colonial phrase while maintaining the
essential imbalance between masculinist, patriotic, power and feminine
subjugation.
Chasing up such particular aspects of women's subjugation
and defiance would allow the application of the ideas put across in Brinda
Mehta's reading of a swathe of Middle Eastern and North African women writers.
The scope of the reading is evident in each chapter, as the sections tackle a
variety of different authors. Chapter Four, for instance, reads a novel by
Faiza Guene showing how the dominant patriarchal discourses of colonial times
have traveled with migrant families, or "beurs" in French slang, to the French
metropolis. One of the case studies examined in this chapter concerns young
Parisian "beurettes," slang for the teenage girls of North African origins, who
find themselves in a double bind: between the patriarchy of Islam and the
sexual pressures of late capitalist urban culture. As with every other chapter,
the conceptual literature is richly interwoven; in this case the works of Franz
Fanon are used to explore the liminality of women's experiences as members of a
migrant social group rooted in a colonial experience.
Brinda Mehta has written a compelling and complex account of
Middle Eastern and North African women's experiences that stretches from
colonial cases studies to the last chapter's discussion of the Egyptian
Revolution in 2011. The case study of North African girls and women living in
Parisian suburbs would be of particular interest to the readership of this
journal. The book's discussion of the "beurettes" and their experience, which
should encourage further examination of the European mahjar (or Ghourba in
Maghrebi) in and of itself, could
form some basis for comparison of how Middle Eastern migrants and their
daughters have integrated themselves in the suburbs of other metropoli around
the world. This book's definitive
originality lies in being able to undertake this analysis by framing the themes
through an examination of (semi)fictional works.This makes for a book not fixed to any
particular discipline but rather emphasizing a humane feminist approach that
provides a series of interesting insights.