The idea of the “nation-state” with a monolithic, homogeneous “imagined community” has dominated discourses in many of the twentieth century Arab states, with competing ideas about who the nation is. Faced with the Arab Spring, the question of national belonging became more pressing, sometimes with violent results. Further, globally, the questions: who is the “other?,” and who are we? have become difficult, as the “other” is now a category in “constant flux” (Blommaert 2013: 5). I examine the nation (and its often violent effects) from feminist perspectives in recent literary productions of Arab women writers who responded to the violence of the state with various creative ideas. I juxtapose the writing of the Palestinian Sahar Khalifa, with that of the Jordanian, Samiha Khrais. Comparing both feminist projects sheds light on the identity struggles in Arab communities. Jordan and Palestine have had to demarcate their identity boundaries since at least 1948 and the Palestinian dispossession. Are these authors concerned about these boundaries? Where do women belong in these boundaries? These are some of the questions I investigate through their literature. Discourse analysis of “Hybridity” (Eyal 2006), and “crossing” (Rampton 2005) is utilized to aid me in this investigation. I also address briefly these authors translated works to English. How much is the publishing industry influencing the translation and marketing of these works?

Al-Mawluda: The Story of Naela Kamel, née Marie Elie Rosenthal is a tour-de-force of twentieth-century Egyptian history from the marginal yet engaged perspectives of Kamel’s mother, born in 1931 Cairo to an Egyptian-born Jewish father and an Italian Christian mother. Instead of leaving Egypt with most of the other khawaga in the political aftermath of 1948’s reverberations, Marie stayed. She eventually married a fellow leftist activist and over their lifetime, the whole of Egypt’s cultural and political elite seems to have worked with them, been imprisoned with them, or passed through their living room for a drink. She writes in her mother’s voice and achieves a distinct oral tone through nontraditional syntax, almost cinematic imagery, and extensive use of ‘amiyya – the book is written almost entirely in Egyptian spoken Arabic, with a liberal smattering of Italian, French, and English loan words. Before Marie’s death, Kamel recorded her mother recounting her life stories, interviewed family and friends, drew upon her own memory, and searched through articles, letters, books, and photographs to assemble the events of her mother’s life and create her distinct narrative voice. Thus, she blurs the boundaries of authorship and genre, producing something between biography and memoir. Kamel’s book is an intimate take on the twentieth-century political movements that shaped Egypt and the region: decolonization, Zionism, Arab Nationalism, communism, Sadat’s infitah, and feminism. Despite politics and popular culture permeating the air Marie breathed, family relationships drive the narrative. Therefore, I focus my analysis on the way political commitments and the looming question of the nation are domesticated in al-Mawluda. I use ‘domesticated’ here to mean cut down to the scale and concerns of the family, but also to express how political commitments are inscribed into the family and create a sense of belonging. The way Kamel domesticates the communist anticolonial politics that marked her mother’s life brings politics into the home, into the family story. Thus, Kamel’s domesticated narrative frame gets at a core tension – even dialectic – between politics and family, between her mother’s political commitments and how those commitments are conveyed intergenerationally in an era where national liberation and communism are largely passé and defeated. Kamel’s narrative domestication mourns her mother’s political ideals, offering them up to be reimagined and reformulated to meet Egypt’s post-revolution future.

I examine the nation from feminist perspectives in the recent literary production of the Jordanian writer, Samiha Khrais, with focus on indigenous feminism rooted in traditional Jordanian societies, challenging the orientalist view of Arab women and exploring their role in reconstructing the nation and providing an alternative narrative to regional history written by orientalists in the post-colonial era. Through this effort, I historicize and contextualize Khrais’ work with focus on her novel, The Tree Stump (2019), and discuss its role in creating an alternative narrative to the history of The Arab Revolt presented by T.E. Lawrence in his work, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). I also explore the possible impact of making the work of Arab indigenous feminist writers like Samiha Khrais available in translation on re-thinking the role of Arab women writers in the construction of identity, rewriting history, and the rebuilding of the nation.