Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door, 2000; orig. Ar. 1960 al-Bab al-Maftuh) and Malika Mokeddem’s Century of Locusts (orig. Fr. 1992 Le siècle des sauterelles) are postcolonial Arab feminist novels that locate women’s agency in a liberatory resistance narrative through critiques of colonialism and patriarchy. Through struggles against, to varying degrees in each of the two novels, colonialism and patriarchy, agency rises in the female protagonists. Saba Mahmood’s Foucault- and Butler-informed exploration of alternate types of agency brings fruitful questions to bear on the argument among these novels. Mahmood says that a liberatory narrative pre-supposes “that human agency primarily consists of acts that challenge social norms and not those that uphold them” (The Politics of Piety, 2005:5); such a narrative is at play in the Zayyat and Mokeddem novels. The Man Booker-awarded novel from Oman, Jokha al-Harthi’s Celestial Bodies (2019, orig. Ar. 2010 Sayidat al-Qamar), delineates a different kind of agency, one that does not presume a resistance narrative or radical break with tradition as a necessary condition for female agency. Multiple characters in the Omani novel marshal social wisdom across generations and traditional women’s alternate forms of knowledge to create increased spheres of agency for themselves. Here, “agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms” (Mahmood 2005:14). In productive conversation with each other, then, these three novels render the development of their protagonists’ agency quite differently at the crux of multiple systems of power specifically including class, colonialism, and the Arab slavery system with its legacy of Arab anti-blackness. Three Arab feminist novels from different regions and decades thus emplot contrapuntal themes about the nature of agency. Perhaps Sayidat al-Qamar intervenes in older Arab feminist conversations, which tended to be mashreq-and-Maghreb-dominated, from its different experiential base in Oman, within the larger context that more and more Gulf novels are introducing new paradigms and lexicons into these longstanding conversations. Or maybe region is an inadequate explanation for the difference Sayidat al-Qamar brings into the conversation; maybe that difference simply marks a place of dynamic counterpoint in the ongoing Arab feminist conversation.

This paper aims to explore how Moroccan women writers reflect national narratives in their novels. The texts analyzed will be al-Nar wa-l-Ikhtiyar (1969, Fire and Choice) by Khanata Bennuna, Amm al-Fil (1987, Year of the Elephant) by Layla Abu Zayd and ‘Azzuza (2010, Azzuza), by al-Zahra Ramij. The three novels are characterized by the presence of a strong main female character who intends to take her own destiny by her hands, and can be read as a symbol of a national collective self. Postcolonial studies have noted the necessity of writing new histories that are both postcolonial and post-nationalist, and following Jonathan Wyrtzen, this is necessary to grasp “the complexities, contingences, nuances, and contradictions” in the formation of postcolonial identities (2015, 7). In addition to this, postcolonial critique together with gender studies have noted how the participation of women in nationalist struggles was erased from official narratives after independence. Some authors explain how the symbolic feminization experienced by men during colonialism favored, as a response, the creation of narratives that offered a “male-centered vision of national destiny” (Boehmer, 2005:216). Moroccan nationalism was not an exception to this, and although women fought against the colonizers alongside with men, with the constitution of the independent state and the proclamation of the Moudawwana (The Family Code), women were relegated to a secondary role in the building of the new nation. This male-centered version of nationalism has been reflected on literature, as has been analyzed by Tetz Rooke in “Moroccan Autobiography as National Allegory” (1997). However, with the advent of female literature in the late 1960s, Moroccan women writers started to give account to female participation in the national struggle, which was marginalized from official masculine narratives. I suggest that contemporary Moroccan female novels can be read as examples of female national allegories. By analyzing novels published in different periods of Moroccan’s recent history, the paper will explore how nationalist issues are still an important motive in Moroccan fiction, and how women writers have also joined this trend in their writing. Through their novels, women writers demonstrate how the destiny of the nation can also be female. They defend the recognition of women’s ongoing participation in the making of the nation.

Whenever doors, keys and locks are associated with Arab women, an image of the hareem emerges, especially in the west, whereby Orientalized women are objects of silencing and confinement. This paper attempts to present a counter image of Arab women revealing them as key holders whose narratives seek to emancipate readers from captivity within a single story about Arabs, Arab women, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ghada Karmi's In Search of Fatima (2002), Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Genin (2010), and Radwa Ashour's Altantoureyya (2010), translated by Kay Heikkinen as The Woman from Tantoura (2018,) are three examples of timely texts that unlock the past to reveal the massacres, looting and abuse perpetrated by Israeli forces in Israel’s "War of Independence" back in 1948. These texts are testimonies, which counterbalance efforts to scour archives and remove historical documents containing proof of the Nakba (Palestinian Catastrophe). In June 2019, Haaretz published a news feature entitled: "Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs". In this news feature, Tamar Novick, a researcher in the fields of history of technology and Middle East studies, tells of her experience while trying to locate a document of a massacre in Safsaf, a Palestinian village now known as Moshav Safsufa. According to Haaretz, "When [Novick] asked those in charge where the document was, she was told that it had been placed behind lock and key at Yad Yaari – by order of the Ministry of Defense”. In their attempt to unlock such documents, Karmi, Abulhawa, and Ashour use autobiography and fiction to deconstruct certain terms (Exodus, for example), and to decompose negative stereotypes (the Arab terrorist) while reconstructing new images for the land and its people. Rewriting the Palestinian forced expulsion from their lands, the Israeli massacres of the people and the demolition of whole villages, Karmi, Abulhawa, and Ashour expose the Palestinian Exodus and the terrorists whose mention is forcefully erased from, or at best ignored in history. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to highlight a modern tradition of Arab women historicization of the Arab-Israeli conflict, one which places Arab women as agents of knowledge production in an age of contradicting narratives and disappearing archives. For a theoretical frame, the researchers will use an eclectic approach that comprises insights from postcolonial theory, historicism, and women's studies.

Fatema Mernissi (1940-2015) was a sociologist, historian, and academic raised in Morocco as well as in France. She is considered a champion of feminist literature from her works of nonfiction like Beyond the veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern History (1975) to her works of fiction like Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994). Throughout her extensive bibliography, Mernissi has shared stories of women through all classes and religions. Her critiques of Muslim society proved that women are always changing and, as a result, changing the societies around them. She is a pioneer in feminist literature that has made an irreversible impact on women in Middle Eastern society. Audre Lorde (1935-1992) was a poet, essayist, novelist, and activist from Harlem, New York. A self-proclaimed “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Lorde believed in the interconnectedness of all people. She also recognized the differences between all people and how those differences might unite society. This “warrior poet” reconceptualized feminism to include all races and classes. Both authors focus on women’s intellectual and physical evolution as well as society’s reactions to these developments. Within each of Lorde and Mernissi’s works, the underlying element is power. The purpose of this undergraduate’s research is to explore this power. Different ways that women find power in their identity, their families, their eroticism, and their communities. The method of conducting this research stems from reading Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider” and Fatima Mernissi’s “Beyond the Veil: Male- Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society” independently of one another. After analyzing both, this researcher identified many ideas from one work that corresponds and compliments the other work. The following comparative study expands upon these complimentary ideas by summarizing and examining additional works from Toni Morrison and Nawal El Saadawi, authors from the West and the East respectively. This comparative study uses identity, eroticism and rejection of the patriarchy as a form of power, generational differences, and the significance of education as a criterion to analyze these four authors. This researcher works to investigate how feminist authors from the East and West reimagined the definition of womanhood to encompass the growing dynamism apparent in both societies, thereby positively impacting the world as a whole.