Erased, Not Forgotten: Seven Arab Women Writers

Erased, Not Forgotten:

Seven Arab Women Writers

By ArabLit Staff

To accompany Sally El Haq’s moving essay on rediscovering Alifa Rifaat, we have assembled a list of seven Arab women authors whose writings, and sometimes person, were erased, censored, or marginalized from what might have been — in a different world — their rightful places in literary memory. As Fatma Qandil says in a forthcoming interview, “Writing about your inner self and your life in a conservative society that views women in a particular way is a dangerous activity, and it opens you up to a wide range of criticism. The gentlest of these is to be marginalized, but that’s simply the fate we have to face up to.”

Though the writing lives of many of the women listed here were cut short by ill health and suicide, or simply by abandoning writing, their words remain and invite us to discover them anew.

Zaynab Fawwaz

Nowadays recognized more widely as a trailblazer of feminism, Lebanese-born and Egyptian-identified writer and historian Zaynab Fawwaz (c. 1850-1914) wasn’t forgotten in her own time, as scholar and translator Marilyn Booth writes. Her writings were and in large part remain, however, unavailable in print or most libraries and untranslated, with very few exceptions. Not even Fawwaz’s novel, حسن العواقب (The Happy Ending, 1899)—considered the first Arabic novel written by a woman—is readily available either in print or digitized, and has not been translated. As we wrote in a 2019 Women in Translation Month post:

“Surely there’s work to be done in bringing her words to contemporary readers.”

May Ziadeh

Although May Ziadeh (1886-1941) was undoubtedly an important turn-of-century literary figure, and the founder of a vibrant literary salon, literary career was certainly interrupted — if not derailed — by a cousin institutionalizing her against her will in 1936. Upon her release in 1938, the same cousin filed a suit to declare her legally incompetent. Although the suit was dismissed, and the forced guardianship annulled in 1939, she died just two years later.

And while she has certainly not been forgotten — she is remembered globally as a feminist icon and for her connection to Khalil Gibran — her own literary work has been largely neglected. Often, she is remembered more as a symbol than for her literary innovations.

Samira Azzam

As M Lynx Qualey writes in her introduction to Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam (tr. Ranya Abdelrahman): “We had Samira Azzam (1927–1967) for far too few years, and we never got to read what she would do with a novel. Still, she did leave us with five vivid short-story collections, as well as reviews, articles, translations, and countless hours of broadcast radio. Yet after her death, her work fell into a half-shadow, in which she was acknowledged as great, but not quite canonized (…) And yet Samira Azzam’s work persists from the margins, much like her vividly imagined characters.”

Read the full introduction, the short story “On the Road” in Ranya’s beautiful translation, or simply buy the entire collection here.

Enayat al-Zayyat

The hero of Iman Mersal’s genre-bending portrait (Traces of Enayat, tr. Robin Moger), Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat (1936-1963), struggled with feelings of alienation her whole life. Her only completed novel, الحب والصمت (Love and Silence), was only published four years after her suicide, and soon forgotten—al-Zayyat never entered the literary canon, and her personal archive including a draft for a second novel was destroyed by her family. In Traces of Enayat, Mersal offers, more than sixty years after al-Zayyat’s death, a delicately balanced, honest, and wide-ranging account of her search for the elusive writer.

You can read an interview with Mersal about researching and writing her book here.

Layla Baalbaki

Lebanese writer Layla Baalbaki’s (1936–2023) انا احياء (I Live, 1958), voted as one of the 100 best Arabic novels of the 20th century by the Arab Writers Union, was her first, published when she was just 22 years old. I Live was followed by the fierce الإلهة الممسوخة (The Deformed Gods) and the brilliant short-story collection سفينة حنان إلى القمر (Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon), published in 1963 and soon banned as “pornographic.” Baalbaki was charged with outraging public modesty, leading to the first trial of its kind in Lebanon. Although Baalbaki was acquitted, the experience led her to migrate to the UK and to stop writing fiction.

Baalbaki’s I Live remains in popular circulation. It has unfortunately not yet been translated to English, although her story “The Cat” appeared in the CATS issue of ArabLit Quarterly, translated by Tom Abi Samra, maia tabet translated an excerpt from “Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon,” and Maru Pabón translated several of Baalbaki’s articles for the Winter 2023 issue of Kohl magazine.

Arwa Salih

An unflinchingly committed leader of Egypt’s 1970s student movement, activist and thinker Arwa Salih’s (1951-1997) memoir The Stillborn. Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt reflects on her experience in and bitter disappointment with the revolutionary Left. Connecting the personal and the political, The Stillborn was published a few months before Salih committed suicide in 1997.

The book appeared in Samah Selim’s English translation in 2016.

Malika Moustadraf

Shunned during her lifetime for her outspoken feminist activism, the innovative cult-classic Moroccan writer Malika Moustadraf’s (1969–2006) complete short stories (Trente-Six) appeared in Alice Guthrie’s translation as Blood Feast (US, Feminist Press)/Something Strange, Like Hunger (UK, Saqi Books) in 2022. Moustadraf was ill most of her short adult life, and skimped on essential medications in order to self-publish her first and only novel, a decision she later regretted. Still, she left behind a small, vibrant corpus of literary work in Arabic, and now English.

Read Guthrie’s introduction to Blood Feast here.

Also read: Almost Erased and Almost Discovered: Finding Alifa Rifaat