May Goes On: (Re)-Introducing May Ziadeh
May Goes On:
(Re)-Introducing the Perennial Resonance of May Ziadeh
By Ibtihal Rida Mahmood
“May” is doing triple duty this year: it’s a month, a name, and a long-overdue return. On May 1st—yes, May in May—the English translation of Sawanih Fatat (Musings of a Young Woman) by May Ziadeh arrives as the second title in ArabLit’s ERASED, NOT FORGOTTEN series, following Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam (tr. Ranya Abdelrahman). If Azzam emerged as a literary voice in the wake of the 1948 Nakba, then Ziadeh’s prose reaches further back into the early tremors of the Arab Nahda, to ask a question that still feels dangerously current: what does it mean for a woman to write herself into existence?
A Woman with a Pen, A Room Full of Men
Born in 1886 in Nazareth, Palestine to a Lebanese father and Palestinian mother, May Ziadeh—Marie, Mary, Isis Copia—lived many lives across many languages. She studied in Lebanon, matured intellectually in Cairo, and wrote in French before choosing Arabic as her literary home, aligning herself with the intellectual ambitions of the Nahda. She balanced a prolific career in education and publishing with a lifelong devotion to reading. Her intellectual appetite led her to learn German, Italian, Spanish, and English, providing the foundation for a literary output that spanned multiple genres.
In 1912, Ziadeh founded her famous “Tuesday Seminar” salon in Cairo, a gathering that quickly became one of the Arab world’s most vibrant intellectual spaces. Among its attendees were towering literary figures like Taha Hussein, Khalil Mutran, Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad, and Ahmad Shawqi. They came to listen, debate, perform, and, one suspects, orbit.
As Ghada Samman later observed, Ziadeh was often treated as an “intellectual ornament,” her beauty catalogued more carefully than her ideas. Critics would describe her salon like an interior design project, yet stumble when asked to engage seriously with her writing. “Read Miss May’s writings and you find nothing that offends you,” one famously wrote—praise that manages to insult.
Upon hearing her name, many would easily recall one or two of the tragedies that befell Ziadeh: the brilliant salonnière of Cairo, admired by the leading intellectuals of her day; the correspondent and beloved of Gibran Khalil Gibran; the woman later accused of madness, institutionalized, and subjected to humiliating legal battles over her autonomy. This narrative persists, in part, because it is compelling, and in part because it offers a story that can be consumed without requiring one to read her work closely, or to take seriously the intellectual engine driving it.
Yet we’re also speaking of a woman writer whose obituary appeared in the Cairo newspaper al-Muqattam with the title “Arabism Grieves for the Loss of May.” To mark the 40th day after her passing, Huda Sha’rawi, one of the most prominent Arab feminists of all time, held a massive memorial service at the Egyptian Feminist Union headquarters on December 4, 1941. The event’s organizing committee featured prominent figures like Sheikh Mustafa Abdel Razek (Minister of Public Endowments), Ahmed Lutfi Al-Sayed, Taha Hussein, and the editor-in-chief of al-Ahram newspaper.
Musings, or How to Spell a Self onto the Page
In 1922, May Ziadeh became the first woman to lecture at the American University of Beirut. That was also the year she published Sawanih Fatat.
Neither memoir nor manifesto, Sawanih is a genre-defying book that combines essays, reflections, poems, even a microplay. It speaks in a voice that is at once singular and collective: “We young women who write,” insisting on women’s right to think and question, to be read as more than an auxiliary to the human species.
As scholar Marilyn Booth argues, Ziadeh’s work participates in a form of autobiographical writing that is “surreptitious, muted, or sketchy,” embedded within genres that do not announce themselves as self-narration. What emerges is not a single, stable “I,” but a shifting one: sometimes plural “we young women,” sometimes intimate “you, at the window,” sometimes displaced into the stories of others.
This new translation of Sawanih Fatat, brought forth by a collective of women translators and editors, echoes the text’s own opening gesture: a “we” that writes, reads, and reclaims together. There is something fitting, almost poetic, about a team of skilled, educated women carrying forward a text that wrestles, again and again, with what it means for women to write, to be read, to be seen. It is also, inevitably, an act of interpretation, one that must grapple with the nuances of Ziadeh’s prose; its shifts in tone moving between candor and sarcasm.
Ziadeh once expressed the hope that someone might do her justice after her death; we took it as an invitation and gladly accepted it.
The Logistics
Ziadeh’s book will be released serially through an email newsletter. You can sign up for free here: https://mayziadeh.substack.com/; those who sign up at the paid level will also get a copy of the print book this fall.
The book is forthcoming, in ebook and in print editions, in October 2026.
We will also be running more work by, about, and addressed to May Ziadeh in the coming months. Reach out to us at info@arablit.org for more information or to submit a “Letter to May.”
The collective includes: Ibtihal Rida Mahmood, Dana Al Shahbari, M Lynx Qualey, Mennan Salih, Boutheina Khaldi, Marilyn Booth, Chloe Bordewich, Meriem Essaoudy, Fatima El-Kalay, Layla AlAmmar, Ranya Abdelrahman, Alaa Alqaisi, Imane Amraoui, Allison Armijo, Anam Zafar, Emma Hardy, and Leonie Böttiger.
Ibtihal Rida Mahmood is a writer, editor, translator, and poet. She is the translator and co-editor of Snow in Amman: An Anthology of Short Stories from Jordan (2015) and the English translator of Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (2017). Her essays, translations, and criticism have appeared in The Markaz Review, New Internationalist, Qantara, The Seattle Globalist, and Women Writers, Women’s Books. Her poetry and literary translations have been featured in international anthologies, including The Art of Being Human (2013), Premio Mondiale di Poesia Nosside (2014), and Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets (2025). She is a contributing editor at ArabLit. She also publishes the Substack newsletter Naked Shadows on a Black Wall.