The Community of Female Voices in Arab Women Literature :: Fatima Mernissi Arab Culture Cultural Essays

The Community of Female Voices in Arab Women LiteratureIn her memoir, Dreams of Trespass, Fatima Mernissi remembers asking her grandmother Yasmina how superstar bottom discern a dependable story from a false iodine. The wise old womanhood, Yasmina, told her granddaughter to relax and non look at life in extreme polarities because there argon things which could be both true and false and things which could be neither (Dreams, 61). Words are alike onions, Yasmina explained further and the more skins you peel off, the more meanings you encounter (Dreams, 61). Thus, according to Yasmina, the reliable power of finding the true answer for oneself is to discover multiplicities of meanings because then reasoned and wrong become irrelevant (Dreams, 61). Yasminas image of words as onions can be used in ones understanding of the multilayered complexity of burdensomeness in Arab women literature. Although in some novels, such as The Pillars of Salt and Drams of Trespass, female oppres sion is an obvious result of social norms, in other texts (In the Eye of the Sun, for example) the master(prenominal) female character, Asya Ulama, seems to be free of any form of social pressure. However, one has to keep in mind that no woman ever stands alone in her oppression, whether it is physical or psychological oppression, or both. Thus, the purpose of this wall(a)paper is to peal off all the skins of an onion or to uncover all the different layers of female oppression presented in the five books Pillars of Salt, A woman of Five Seasons, A Balcony Over Fakihani, Dreams of Trespass and In the Eye of the Sun.The feminist Theory The feminist writer, Gloria Anzaldua, argues that in order for silence to transform into speech, sound and words, the silence must first traverse through our female bodies (Making, XIII). check to Anzaldua, the female silence is richly layered and it hides important voices which once discovered lead to womens liberation. Many feminist writers woul d argue that women can only see to it their stories when they listen to (and follow) their inner voices. These inner voices are not only whimsical voices of the self but also communal voices that connect women with past and coming(prenominal) generations. Thus, if one is to explore the oppression of Muslim women through the work of Arab women novelists, one must keep in mind the multilayered complexity of womens voices, or what I call the community of