Women in contemporary arabic and francophone fiction

Abstract

This essay recreates the female drama in the Arab World as incarnated by a few heroines during key periods of the Arabs’ contemporary history, in the belief that art imitates reality and also moulds it, as it is changing and becoming. The essay broadly re-enacts patterns of behavior quite typical of the male-female relationships in the Arab World, as they are constantly changing and becoming. Our story unfolds between that of Amina, Naguib Mahfouz’s heroine in hisTrilogy and a few Lebanese heroines who have lived the civil war in Beirut (1975–1990) in Emily Nasrallah’s fiction. In between, we move from Mahfouz’s Egypt, to Tayeb Salih’s Sudan, to T.Y. Awwad’s Lebanon, to Taher Ben Jelloun’s Morocco, and back to Lebanon, making halts during World War I, pre-Nasserite Egypt, post-independent Sudan, the Arab-Israeli War, and the war-torn Lebanon of the last two decades.