Accad, Evelyne

Evelyne Accad was born in 1943 in Beirut, Lebanon. She earned her Ph.D. at Indiana University and then went on to teach African and Arab Francophone Literatures at the University of Illinois, Champagne–Urbana. She is a literary critic, novelist, poet, and musician. Accad was one of the first critics of Arab Literature to focus on women writers. After publishing Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Contemporary Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World in 1978, she turned her attention to writings on the civil war in Lebanon.

In War and Sexuality: Literary Masks of the Middle East (1989), she evinces a concern for men’s advocacy of violence and looks to women’s fiction for hope of reprieve and an ultimate solution. This critical work complements the fiction she has written on the war: L’Excisée (1982), a novel about clitoridectomy and patriarchy set against the background of the war, and Coquelicot du Massacre (1988). Her next novel, Blessure des Mots(1993), moves to Tunisia,...