THE Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology” edited by Nathalie Handal is a ground-breaking compilation celebrating the creativity and diversity of contemporary female Arab poets. Featuring the work of 83 poets, it dispels stereotypes of life in the Middle East, of the Arab identity and of Arab women living in the Arab world and in the West. The anthology includes well-established poets as well as regional and new ones.
There are poets from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in addition to Arab-American and Arab-Canadian poets. The anthology links contemporary poets to a historic timeline that traces the development from pre-Islamic poets to the present-day, highlighting classical Arabic poetry and its rules to today’s free verse with fans throughout the Arab world. Handal begins by referring to the pivotal role that poetry plays in the Arab world and alludes to “the abundance of their (Arabs’) literary productions and their impressive literary history, giving the world numerous poets. Arab women poets have participated in this illustrious literary tradition since pre-Islamic times.” One of the most distinctive features of the book is the classification of poets by geographical region and the analysis carried out by tracing the characteristics of each group, their growths and the factors influencing their thinking and work.
Starting with Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine the salient characteristics of the works are brought forth. Referring to the creation of a francophone literature of Arab writers such as the work of Etel Adnan, the pioneering Arab-American poet, the editor notes the importance of a homeland, the role of war, the growth of feminist consciousness and the role played by an Islamic reawakening as well as women’s movement which helped women become more aware of Islamic principles and empowered them on socio-cultural levels. Handal also refers to the Palestinian poets’ work as “a poetry that rarely escapes the heavy weight of occupation, of exile both outside and inside their country, echoing the pains and conflicts associated with loss of homeland,” and points out the strains of daily life and oppression as illustrated in the work of numerous poets led by some of the most prominent women writers, literary critics and poets Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Fadwa Tuqan the avant garde poet and other Palestinian poets whose work has been published in English, Hebrew, Swedish and Arabic.
Handal makes the transition to the influences of war in other areas of the Arab world when she notes that the recurring theme of war is picked by most poets from countries such as Iraq and Yemen, while the yearning for freedom is echoed by all the featured poets regardless of their homeland.
After analyzing the influences of countries and geographic regions on the poets’ work, the editor includes a section on Arab-American and Arab-Canadian women starting off with a historical perspective of immigration of predominantly Christian families from the Levant and Palestine and then the immigration of Muslims following the 1940s and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. But regardless of their faith and their knowledge of or lack of Arabic, most Arab-American poets have, according to the editor “gone back to their culture of origin and tried to understand it, be part of it, nourish it and expand it in their lives and beings, while remaining in an American context or background.”
The ever-present issue of cultural identity and questioning Arab identity is alluded to and the effect of the Gulf War on young writers in their ‘profound self revelation’, the influences of politics and stereotypes, and discrimination are clearly defined in this section. Handal then highlights the works of numerous popular American poets such as the leading poet, Naomi Shihab Nye.
Handal defines the steps she had to take for this project, from the complicated task of locating the poets in a time that predates the use of emails to translating. This has in a way limited the number of featured poets and she acknowledges that there are other important poets that are not included due to the unavailability of contact data at the time of publication.
This anthology is definitely an ambitious project necessitating a tremendous amount of work of translation.
It is an amazing exercise when taking into consideration the differences in poetic traditions, images, ideas, religious and cultural references, rhyme, meter and technical aspects of compositions.
The inclusion of short biographies of the poets offers a fascinating insight into their lives, adding another dimension to the compositions featured.
The biographies also reflect the editor’s selection of featured poets based on technical and artistic merit in addition to their sense of history even though she did include non-established poets in order to highlight new voices.
The anthology on the whole serves to satisfy the curiosity about, and fascination with, the status of women in the Arab world and their remarkable contributions and creativity. It truly serves as Handal states “to eradicate the invisibility” of Arab female poets and fulfills the editor’s aim to “bridge the religious, linguistic and geographical space existing among Arab women worldwide.”
- Arab News Review 16 October 2003
