- Yaḥyā al-Ṭāhir ʿAbdallah (1938 – 1989, Egypt) – Al-Ṭawq wa al-Aswūrah (‘The hoop and the bracelets’, 1975). This novel depicts a merciless and authoritarian patriarchal society through the lives of three generations of women (reference). The novel portrays the change in attitude of the women towards their husbands: while the grandmother is submissive to her husband, her granddaughter implements a suicidal defiance of social costumes. The novel also portrays the story of the granddaughter’s brother who moves from to Sudan, Palestine, and eventually the Canal Zone to find work, and his subsequent alienation from his family and community (also in M: Movement: (E) Migration, Refugees and Return: (E) Migration: Arab Migrant workers).
- Malikah al-Dār Muḥammad ʿAbdallah (1920 – 1969, Sudan) – al-Farāgh al-ʿArīdah (‘The emptiness of the wide hollowness, ’1970). Published posthumously, this novel is considered the first Sudanese novel by a woman. It centres Munā, who is forced to move to Omdurman with her mother and grandfather to live with her father’s family. The novel is set in Sudan before independence, and sheds light both on World War II and the social changes, specifically related to the role of women in society in general, and within the traditional household. The novel is the first and last by Malikah al-Dār Muḥammad ʿAbdallah (also in 1956 Independence Sudan).
- Rachid Boudjedra (written elsewhere as Rashīd Būjdirah, 1941-, Algeria) – La Répudiation (1969, English trans. The Repudiation, 1995). The author narrates the drama of his life to his French girlfriend, showing his alienation from the civilization of his origin and his orientation towards France, the colonial power that, despite everything, offers the intellectual tools for emancipation. The narrator’s feeling of rebellion is therefore not aimed at the colonial oppressor but rather towards the father-figure who derives the justification of his behavior from religion, which thus proves to be a repressive system, the ideological arm of patriarchal claims to power. The fact that the narrator ends up in a mental asylum is meant to prove that fathers who abandon their paternal responsibilities but retain their private and public power are responsible for their children’s neuroses and, ultimately, for the sickness of their society (reference) (also in F: Children and Family Life: Parent and Child: Father and Child).
- Nina Bouraoui (1967-, France- Algeria) – La voyeuse interdite (‘The forbidden voyeur’, 1991). This short novel is narrated by an Algerian teenage girl locked up in her Algiers apartment by her religious father and reflects on the way in which she deals with this social isolation in a resourceful manner (reference).
- Driss Chraїbi (1926 – 2007, Morocco) – Le Passé simple (1954, English trans. The Simple Past, 1991, 2019). This autobiographical novel shares with the reader a family triangle consisting of a father, a mother, and a son. The father of the Ferdi family, Seigneur, is to represent a whole social order. He is the embodiment of power, force, ruthlessness, and ignorance, whilst the mother is weakness and submissiveness personified. The son observes his situation with horror and develops a profound hatred of his father and a certain disgust in relation towards his mother. After his father sent him to a French lycée, the narrator learns to judge his own situation and eventually moves to France (reference) (also in S: Social Issues and Societal Changes: Class and Social Conflict).
- Assia Djebber (written elsewhere as Assiya Jabbār, 1936 – 2015, Algeria) – Ombre Sultane (1987, English trans. A Sister to Sheherazade, 1987). Two co-wives of an autocratic husband form the centre of this novel, the westernized Isma and her culturally indigenous co-wife Hajila (reference). Isma conspires with Hajila against their subversiveness to the patriarchal home, leading to their relationship turning into a hybrid western-Arab feminist sisterhood, which interrogates the patriarchal social and cultural values in the Algerian context in which the story takes place (reference) (also in L: Cultural and Literary Heritage: Folktales: A Thousand and One Nights).
- Shadhī al-Khaṭīb (?, Yemen) – Bayt al-Binafsaj (‘The purple house’, 2014). This novel describes the family arguments taking place after the death of the father, who in his will leaves the family house to one of his sons, Sulaymān.
- Saḥar al-Mūjī’s (1963-, Egypt) short story ‘The Dummy’ (2005), in which the patriarch of the family is completely absent, yet completely affects the life of his family members. The story can be found in Arab Women Writers: An Anthology of Short Stories (2005).
- Hudā al-Naʿīmī’s (?, Qatar) short story collection Abāṭīl (‘Vanities’, 2001). Describes in a dreamy and magical style different stories of women resisting patriarchy. The stories make references to historical, folkloric, and mythical figures, such as the characters’ interactions with Ṭaha Ḥussayn, Horus, and the Sufi mystic al-Ḥallāj, but also conversations the heroines have with their ancestors (reference).
- Imīlī Naṣrallah’s (1931 – 2018, Lebanon) short story collection al-Marʾa fī 17 Qiṣṣah (‘Women in 17 stories’, 1984) in which each story represents a woman from a different status and with different personalities, who all cope with the violence of a male dominated society differently.
- Fawziyyah Rashīd (1954-, Bahrain) – al-Qalaq al-Sirī (‘Secret anxiety’, 2000). Heroine of this novel is Sharazād, who grows up with a strict and authoritarian father. The endless stories and fables of her grandfather, al-Shaykh Mabrūk, however, give her the courage to rebel against the laws imposed on her by her father (reference).
- Nawāl al-Saʿadāwī (1931 – 2021, Egypt) – al-Ḥubb fī Zaman al-Nafṭ (1995, English trans. Love in the Kingdom of Oil, 2001, 2019) and Suqūṭ al-Imām (1987, English trans. The Fall of the Imam, 2009, 2020).
In the satirical and surreal al-Ḥubb fī Zaman al-Nafṭ, an unnamed women archeologist, protagonist of the novel, vanishes from her hometown. Her attempt to disappear is an act of total disobedience of the reigning patriarchy that she tries to run away from but keeps being confronted with (reference). Women’s rights and the position of women, in this novel, are linked to the growing environmental concerns surrounding oil, as both oil and women are both subject to a patriarchal system and male control (reference) (also in N: Nature: Extraction).
Suqūṭ al-Imām tells the story of a woman who discovers that she is the illegitimate daughter of the Imam, a political leader who exploits religion for his own ends. Bint-Allah recalls the relationship with her father while she watches his assassination and the preparations for his funeral. She had been wronged by him, and she and her mother are relegated to poverty and persecution if they dare to reveal their relationship with the Imam. The novel describes the conflict between Bint-Allah’s desire for self-expression and the Imam’s political, cultural, and religious authority that represent a patriarchal system (also in F: Children and Family Life: Parent and Child: Father and Child)
- Ghāliyyah Āl Saʿīd (?, Oman) – Ṣābirah wa Aṣīlah (‘Sabira and Asila’, 2007). This novel centres Ṣābirah and Aṣīlah, two friends who live in Muscat in the 1960s. Ṣābirah’s father and brother ultimately control her life, but she manages to escape in her fantasy world and her relationship with a teacher called Shaham. Their love-story ends however, when he travels to London and forgets all his promises to her. He leaves Ṣābirah pregnant, and together with Aṣīlah she manages to hide the pregnancy. But she meets her tragic fate when she and Aṣīlah return from the hospital on the night she gave birth to her daughter, and they run into her brother (also in C: Cities: Oman: Muscat).
- Zakariyyā Tāmir’s (1931-, Syria) short story ‘al-Thaj Ākhir al-Layl’ (‘Snow at the end of the night’) captures the blind hatred of a tyrannical father towards his daughter who has run away from home, and the transference of this hatred to his son. It is only when the girl’s brother envisages the act of slitting her throat, that memories of their childhood together come flooding back to temper his joy at the thought of murdering her (reference).
Refrences:
In order of appearance
- Hilary Kilpatrick. 1992. “The Egyptian novel from Zaynab to 1980.” In Modern Arabic Literature. eds. Muhammad Mustafa Badawi. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 223-270, p. 262
- Hartmut Fähnrich. 1995. “Fathers and Husbands: Tyrants and Victims in some Autobiographical and Semi-Autobiographical Works from the Arab World” in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, eds. Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick, and Ed de Moor. London: Saqi Books 106-116, p. 108, 109, 110
- Marina van Zuylen. 2003. “Maghreb and Melancholy: A Reading of Nina Bouraoui.” Research in African Literatures 34(3): 84-99, p. 84
- Yomi Olusegun-Joseph. 2018. “Differing from her sister’s voice: (Re)configured womanhood in Assia Djebar’s ‘A Sister to Sherezade’.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54(2): 226-238, p. 229
- Ḥayāt Umm al-Saʿad. 2018. “al-Haymanah al-Nisawiyyah al-Takhayuliyah, Baḥtan ʿan Sulṭat al-Ḥaqīqah Khārij Āfāq al-Thukūrah: Qirāʾah fī al-Majmūʿa al-Qiṣaṣiyah ‘Abāṭīl’ li-Hudā al-Naʿīmī.” Al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyah 20(3): 259-270, p. 260, 262
- Salmān Zayn al-Dīn. 2000. “Al-Kātibah al-Bahrayniyah Fawziyyah Rashīd bi-‘al-Qalaq al-Sirī’. Ḥayn la Targhab Sharzād fī Tarqīḍ al-Jalādīn.” www.sauress.com, 11 September 2000, https://www.sauress.com/alhayat/31057717 (last accessed 11 July 2023)
- Layla Hendow. 2017. “Oil and Women: Invisibility as Power in Nawal El-Saadawi’s ‘Love in the Kingdom of Oil’”, in Seen and Unseen: Visual Cultures of Imperialism, eds. Sanaz Fotouhi and Esmaeil Zeiny, Brill: Leiden and Boston 79-97, p. 80, 81
- Roger Allen. 1995. “The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women.” in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, eds. Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick, and Ed de Moor. London: Saqi Books, 77-90, p. 79