By ArabLit Staff with Alexander Elinson
Yesterday, we published an excerpt of Moroccan author and activist Khadija Marouazi’s 2000 prison novel History of Ash, which was published this month in Alex Elinson’s English translation. Although there are a range of powerful prison memoirs by Arab women, there are fewer prison novels. Today, we have a short list of prison narratives by women across the region, both fiction and nonfiction, from Morocco to Palestine to Saudi Arabia.
There are, naturally, many prison narratives by men, fiction and memoir, including a number of outstanding examples: Abdulrahman Munif’s East of the Mediterranean; Sonallah Ibrahim’s Sharaf; Mustafa Khalifa’s The Shell (tr. Paul Starkey); Fadhil al-Azzawi’s Cell Block Five (tr. William Hutchins); and Ahmed Naji’s Rotten Evidence (forthcoming in Katharine Halls’ translation). And while there are a fair number of prison testimonies and memoirs by women, there seem to be fewer fictional works. In a 2008 lecture, the late scholar and novelist Radwa Ashour gave an overview of Arab prison literature, including several testimonial works by women. Marilyn Booth also gives an early overview of prison literature in her 1987 article, “Women’s Prison Memoirs in Egypt and Elsewhere: Prison, Gender, Praxis.”
Marouazi’s History of Ash is one of a smaller group of fictional narratives that include Salwa Bakr’s The Golden Chariot and Maysaa Almoudi’s Mimosa, as well as a few fictionalized memoirs and documentary novels from Syria, such as Rosa Yassin Hassan’s Negative.
This brief list looks at few of these works.
Memoirs and Testimonies
Morocco
Fatna El Bouih was first arrested in Casablanca as an 18-year-old student leader. As her publisher notes, “Over the next decade she was rearrested, forcibly disappeared, tortured, and transferred between multiple prisons. While imprisoned, she helped organize a hunger strike, completed her undergraduate degree in sociology, and began work on a Master’s degree. Beginning with the harrowing account of her kidnapping during the heightened political tension of the 1970s, Talk of Darkness tells the true story of one woman’s struggle to secure political prisoners’ rights and defend herself against an unjust imprisonment.”
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The publisher writes: “Malika Oufkir has spent virtually her whole life as a prisoner. Born in 1953, the eldest daughter of General Oufkir, the King of Morocco’s closest aide, Malika was adopted by the King at the age of five, and was brought up as the companion to his little daughter. Spending most of her childhood and adolescence in the seclusion of the court harem, Malika was one of the most eligible heiresses in the kingdom, surrounded by luxury and extraordinary privilege.”
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Egypt
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El Saadawi is at her best when writing nonfiction; turning her doctor’s gaze onto the world around her. Along with many other writers, poets, and scholars, El Saadawi was imprisoned under the direct orders of Anwar Sadat in 1981. This memoir was apparently written at Qanatir Women’s Prison with an eyebrow pencil on sheets of toilet paper, and it paints a portrait of the women’s lives inside. Ibrahim Fawzy writes about the book
for The Markaz Review..
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On the experience of her incarceration twice during Anwar Sadat’s rule, in 1973 and 1980.
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Marilyn Booth
writes that, “Farida al-Naqqash’s
Al-Sijn, dam‘atani, wa-wardah (Prison, Two Tears, and a Flower) was published in 1985. The first half had appeared five years earlier as
Al-Sijn…al-Watan (Prison…the Nation), after al-Naqqash had spent two months in prison in 1979, accused of membership in the banned Egyptian Communist Party. A further 11 months in prison in 1981-1982 made possible an expansion of the memoirs of this veteran oppositional figure, a leading member of the leftwing Tagammu‘ Party and journalist in the party’s organ,
Al-Ahali.”
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There are comparatively few prison memoirs by Islamists; al-Ghazali was founder of the Muslim Women’s Association and driving force behind the Muslim Brotherhood’s re-establishment after its ban. She was imprisoned in the 1960s, and her memoir about that time was widely read.
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This book was chosen as
a must-read memoir by Najwa Al Ameri, Dalia Ebeid, Mansoura Ezz Eldin, and others. Aflatoun was sent to prison by Pres. Gamal Abdelnasser, where she spent four years for her involvement with the Communist movement. “However,” as
Menna Taher writes in a portrait of the artist, “that was not the first prison in her life. Her first prison in life was the strict catholic school that she was enrolled in until the fourth grade, the Sacred Heart.” Aflatoun also spent time at Qanatir Women’s Prison, which she describes in the memoir.
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Palestine
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Nora Parr writes: “Between them, the nine authors collected into Hafla li-Tha’ira lived nearly 50 years in Israeli prison. They saw babies born in confinement and raised so that they only knew the locking of doors. Others saw their children only through panes of glass.”
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Ahlam Bsharat writes: “
Dreams of Freedom (
أحلام بالحرية) and
Price for the Sun (
ثمنًا للشمس) are two books written by the Palestinian activist Aisha Odeh. Aisha Odeh was born in 1944 in the village of Deir Jarir, Ramallah district. She spent ten years in Israeli occupation prisons from 1969 to 1979 and was able to convey her detention experience in a transparent language in her books. Her experience was stubborn, harsh, and instructive, conveyed in the language of a professional writer, close to her soul and the souls of Palestinian female prisoners in the early stages of the Palestinian struggle. These books are considered international books that approach everything written about experiences of rejection, challenge, and resilience. They are a testament to the victory of many Palestinian women inside four walls, the walls of prison, and the thicker walls of Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
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And Radwa Ashour: “It took Odeh 32 years to write her prison experience. In a note at the end of the book’s second edition, she writes about the great agony of writing, the burden of recreating the moments of suffering. Three years after the publication of the book ‘s first edition, she tells us, she was asked in a TV show about the torture she had experienced, ‘I realized I was not ready to answer. The following morning, I woke up at six in the morning, I was crying and for a whole hour I could not stop. I was still bleeding; the wound was still open 35 years after.'”
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Lebanon
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Radwa Ashour writes of the book: “Beshara is keen to document the details of daily life in al-Khiam where there is ‘no justice …, no trials, no judges, no lawyers. In al Khiam detention centre the prisoners are unacknowledged, invisible, simply non existent in the world of the living.'”
Novels
Egypt
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An imaginative novel set in an Egyptian women’s prison; it’s Aziza who decides to create the titular golden chariot to lift her out of the muck and dread of prison. But here, prison is not just prison, but also sheds lives on the other prisons women face in their lives.
Syria
Rosa Yassin Hassan’s Negative: On the Memories of Female Political Prisoners
Hassan’s is a documentary novel that focuses on descriptions of torture suffered mainly by women Islamist prisoners in Syria.
Hasiba ‘Abd al-Rahman’s The Cocoon
A fictionalized depiction of ‘Abd al-Rahman’s seven years in prison.
Saudi Arabia
Maysaa Alamoudi‘s Mimosa
This Scheherazade-like novel — with women’s life-giving stories nested one into the next — gives insight into women’s lives inside Saudi prisons. These are not only political prisoners, but also migrant laborers, women who fell in love, and others.
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August 18, 2023 @ 10:24 am
Thank you for a great list with many important writers, however, you might want to change from Maha Hassan to Roza Yassin Hassan as the writer of Negative, the novel mentioned from Syria.
August 18, 2023 @ 10:49 am
Yikes! Thank you for catching that!