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Hanan al-Shaykh (1945-) | |
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Lebanese novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, one of the leading contemporary women writers in the Arab world. Her stories deal with women's role in society, the relationship between the sexes, and the institution of marriage. In the short story 'The Persian Carpet' she examined the effect of divorce on the children. The narrator and her sister visit their remarried mother. She notices a Persian carpet on the floor of the new home. It had disappeared from the old family house and her mother had accused an old man who used to repair cane chairs in the quarter. The daughter's relationship with her mother is shattered. "Again I looked at my mother and she interpreted my gaze as being one of tender longing, so she put her arms round me, saying: 'You must come every other day, you must spend the whole of Friday at my place.' I remained motionless, wishing that I could remove her arms from around me and sink my teeth into that white forearm. I wished that the moment of meeting could be undone and re-enacted, that she could again open the door and I could stand there - as I should have done - with my eyes staring down at the floor and my forehead in a frown." (from 'The Persian Carpet') Before turning to writing fiction, Al-Shaykh worked as a journalist in Beirut. Her novels have been translated into English, French, Dutch, German, Danish, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and Polish. Hanan Al-Shaykh was born in Beirut and brought up in Ras al-Naba, a conservative and unfashionable sector of the town. She first attended Alamillah traditional Muslim girls' primary school and then the more sophisticated Ahliyyah School. She started to write, as she once said, to release her anger and frustration towards her father and brother, because they were able to restrict her freedom. By the age of 16, she had already published essays in the newspaper al-Nahar. Between the years 1963 and 1966 she studied at the American College for Girls in Cairo. Back in Beirut she worked in television, also as a journalist for Al-Hasna', a women's magazine, and then for al-Nahar from 1968 to 1975. During the four years al-Shaykh lived in Egypt, she made her debut as a writer with Intihar rajul mayyit, which was published in 1970. It has nothing in common with a typical first novel - instead of being autobiographical it is narrated by a middle-aged man. Through the narrator's obsessive desire for a young girl, al-Shaykh examines power relations between the sexes and patriarchal control. Her next novel, Faras al-shaitan (1971), was written when she lived in the Arabian Peninsula. It included biographical elements related to her extremely religious father, aspects of her own love story, and her subsequent marriage. The narration moves freely in time, and depicts the personal development of the heroine, Sarah, against the background of southern Lebanon. In 1976 al-Shaykh left Lebanon because of the civil war. She lived in Saudi Arabia until 1982, when she moved to London. Al-Shaykh first came to international attention with the publication of Hikayat Zahrah (1980, The Story of Zahra). Because no publisher in Lebanon accepted the novel, she published it first at her own expense. The story operates on many different levels and uses many voices, but in the center is a bewildered and directionless young woman, Zahrah, who finds in the Lebanese Civil War an opportunity to escape oppression. Zahrah's family sends her to Africa to recover from two abortions and a nervous breakdown. She stays with her lecherous uncle, once active in Lebanese politics. To avoid his sexual advances she marries one of his associates. The marriage is loveless and she returns to devastated Beirut - as torn as herself. Chaos transforms her and she falls in love for the first time. But her lover is a sniper who shoots innocent passersby, and the pregnant Zahrah, who carries his own child, becomes one of his targets. The Story of Zahra was banned in most Arab countries. Some of her Lebanese readers rejected the book because it "gives a very wrong impression about Arab culture." Boston Sunday Globe praised it as "an original, moving and powerfully written novel, vividly illuminating the personal human tragedy of war and madness." Misk al-ghazal (1989, Women of Sand and Myrrh) was chosen as one of the 50 Best Books of 1992 by Publishers Weekly. The story was set primarily in an expatriate community in an anonymous Middle-Eastern country. Al-Shaykh tells of four women, each from her own perspective. Two of the women, Nur and Tamr, are Arabs from the unnamed country in question, one is Lebanese, and the fourth is American. Each woman has chosen a different path that reveals their struggle with the patriarchal order. Suha has a degree in Management Studies from the American University of Beirut. She feels disillusioned: "this wasn't the desert that I'd seen from the aircraft, nor the one I'd read about or imagined myself". Suha longs for the freedoms she had in Beirut and has a lesbian relationship; Tamr's success in opening a beauty shop is not easy; Nur is not allowed to travel alone; and the unhappily married Suzanne has a multitude of affairs. "The elaborate network of first-person narrative, in which the text allows the four women to speak in turn giving voice to the voiceless, reflects in its structure the compartmentalization of women and their struggle to break out of all forms of social confinement. The very structure of the novel in which each section conveys a sense of independence while at the same time being an integral part of the whole reflects the degree of sophistication in the authors feminist vision." (Sabry Hafez in Contemporary World Writers, ed. by Tracy Chevalier, 1993) The book was banned in several Middle Eastern countries. Barid Bayrut (1992, Beirut Blues), a novel of correspondence, celebrated the resilience of the human spirit in the middle of the Lebanese Civil War. It consisted of ten letters "written" by Asmahan, a Muslim woman, and addressed either to specific persons, both living and dead, or places. The letters perhaps never reach their destination, but through them Asmahan has a small hope of transferring signs of culture over present devastation. Al-Shaykh's story collection, I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops, was published in English in 1998. In her short-stories al-Shaykh has criticized patriarchal notions of how Arab women should behave, but they also praise Arab cultures that give women a measure of power to negotiate their own realities. In 'A Season of Madness' a woman tries to gain her freedom by becoming mad, while her husband continues to live his life as normal. Only in London (2000) explores in comic light the lives of people caught between the ways of East and West. Lamis, a recently divorced Iraqi woman, has an affair with Nicholas, an Englishman who is an expert in Arabic and eastern antiquities. Another pair is Amira, a prostitute from Morocco, and Samir, a gay Lebanese. For further reading: The Arabic Novel by Roger Allen (1982); War's Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War by Miriam Cooke (1987); Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East by Evelyne Accad (1990); 'The Fiction of Hanan al-Shaykh, Reluctant Feminist' by Charles Larson, in Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, 1 Winter (1991); Contemporary World Writers, ed. by Tracy Chevalier (1993); Arab Women Novelists by Joseph Zeidan (1995); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, vol. 4, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999) Selected works:
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