In the 1990s and into the first decade of the 2000s, a hotly contested debate arose on Egypt’s Cairo-centered literary scene over kitabat al-banat or “girls’ writing,” a derogatory and dismissive term used to lump together uncritically literature written by young women such as Miral al-Tahawy, Nora Amin, May Telmissany, and Nagla ‘Alam. Dismissive terms like this and kitabat al-jasad (writing the body), the latter of which was directed at established and emerging women writers alike, appeared in a flurry of articles, interviews, op-ed pieces, organized discussions, and cultural salons, and colored interpretations of women writers and their works generally. One of the most common and influential, though also unsubstantiated, critiques was that women’s texts enjoyed increased mobility across cultures and were more readily translated than their male counterparts’, due to the cultural politics of Western publishers. Women writers were accused of exploiting their sex and producing overly personal, sensationalistic, and stylistically weak texts that allowed them to achieve an unfair amount of attention both domestically and abroad, especially through translation into Western languages. Award-winning Bedouin, Egyptian novelist and short story writer al-Tahawy, who has since relocated from Cairo to the US, and her works frequently were at the center of such debates, particularly as she gained international recognition and became one of the few living Egyptian writers to have all of her published Arabic novels translated into English. Focusing primarily on al-Tahawy and drawing on archival research I conducted on Egypt’s most influential and widely circulating cultural newspaper, Akhbar al-Adab, as well as relevant articles published in other local literary journals and the work of Egyptian literary scholars such as Hoda Elsadda and Samia Mehrez, this paper examines the multifaceted debate over kitabat al-banat among Egyptian cultural actors during this period. I pay particular attention to how and why the issue of translation and accusations of increased mobility shaped the debate and affected the reception of al-Tahawy and her texts locally. In addition to considering discussions that took women authors and their writings as their subject, I also examine how al-Tahawy and her peers participated actively in such debates and sought to reshape this emerging discourse in Egyptian literary criticism.

This paper examines the writing of three Syrian women poets who had to leave Syria due to the ongoing war, and have become refugees in Europe. In Wedad Nabi’s Death as if it is a Scrap (2016), Rasha Habbal’s Some of you, Lots of Salt (2016), and Rasha Omran’s Panorama of Death and Alienation (2015), writing about their homeland and the land that hosts them is integral to their experiences of displacement and diaspora in Germany, where these three poets are refugees at the moment. These writers illustrate a deep nostalgia and a need to reconcile with being displaced by discovering and creating a definition for a new meaning of “home”. Much of their writing connects to Syria: its cities, history, places, scents, food, sounds, their personal memories, and many other elements that gave them a sense of belonging before their displacement. Though there is a sense of something missing and an incompleteness in their writings, there is not an urgent call for returning home. What is evident instead is their thirst for life: the one they miss or that they lost when they left their homeland, and the one they are now trying to be part of as women, as refugees, and as humans, above all. This paper argues that Syria, for these three writers, is not merely an image to portray and recall in their nostalgic writing; rather, it is part of their diasporic identity as women searching for a new home, and a geographic reality rooted in the trajectories of war and biopolitics. Though identity is constantly being formed and constructed in texts by migrant Arab authors, for writers like Nabi, Habbal, and Omran who had to face brutal, if not life-threatening, challenges as women who crossed borders to reach safety, the question of identity, in their case, is directly related to forced mobility and displacement. Their post-departure writings are not only about displacement and exile; there are also recurring questions that are being asked about the meaning and vitality of the other place that now hosts them, the hope of creating a second home, even if it is only in words, and anxiety about belonging to a foreign place or becoming a new citizen of it.

This paper discusses the intersections of identity, gender and Arab-American politics in the works of Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter (2009) and Miral el-Tahawi’s Brooklyn Heights (2011); two Arab female writers who moved from their countries of origin (Iraq and Egypt) and resettled in The US. From the point of view of the novels’ two female protagonists, America and the Middle East are two worlds that have little in common on the surface, but deep down share similar structures of hierarchy and oppression. As females, they offer a peculiar insider/outsider position on both places commenting on the structures of racism, misogyny and class inequality entrenched in the socio-economic and political apparatus of America and the Middle East. The novels offer a challenging, alternative perception on the relations between the US and the Arab world from the standpoint of two female writers who have experienced patterns of marginalization and exclusion in both worlds and in both cultures. As females they grapple with issues of belonging, visibility, misogyny and mobility in East and West. The paper analyses the techniques of deconstruction of prevalent discourses of division in an attempt to transcend geographical boundaries and critique the self and the other from a simultaneous insider/outsider position. Transnational feminist literature produced by Arab women writers who lived in the Arab world and the West, highlights patterns of similarity between the two worlds that can be unifying and can bring people together to address structures of marginalization and hierarchy in both worlds and cultures. This kind of discourse can mend the fractured relationship between the two worlds following 9/11 and the subsequent wars and political crisis.

This paper examines trans-generational exile, a term which suggests that the effects of being forced to leave home can be transmitted to younger generations. In “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said regards exile as a wound constantly nursed and a predicament that cannot be escaped. It is a contagious disease, he argues, that inflicts the exiles and their children. The paper explores how exile cannot be overridden in The Inheritance of Exile, a collection of short story, written by the Arab female writer Susan Muaddi Darraj. Her collection shows how younger generations of Palestinian immigrants still suffer from the negative outcomes of their parents’ exile. For example, The Inheritance of Exile depicts how four Palestinian American women (Nadia, Aliyah, Hanan and Reema), whose parents are originally from Palestine, cannot assert their American identity despite the fact that they were born in U.S.A. Although these central characters strive to escape the aftereffects of their parents’ displacement by changing their neighbors, moving to different cities in U.S.A., their parents’ histories force these young women to be called “ethnic.”