I Am You (Ana Hiya Anti): A Novel on Lesbian Desire in the ...

There is a kind of Irigarian idolatry of woman: the perfection of woman who is unto herself sufficient.⁹ It is naïve to state that sexual violence is not possible between two women or that the result of sexual encounters of this kind inevitably and always end in mutual fulfilment, but nevertheless the politics of such an affirmation are clear: women do not need men to gain sexual liberation, on the contrary the liberation awaits them once they have embraced their own bodies, and by metaphorical extension then, the bodies of other women. There is a sense reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s concept of the woman-identified-woman; becoming lesbian as a political strategy rather than being lesbian in a way transcendent of political concerns.¹⁰ To become lesbian is a means for women to regain what they have lost at the hands of an unforgiving, abusive and misogynist patriarchy, which seems to be capable of stripping them of power during the sex act, a certain sex act that we glimpse in nearly every Nawal Sadawi¹¹ novel or Inas Degheidi film¹² and in Siham’s impassioned speech against robbery, abuse of the weak and the like.

We should also pay attention to the fact that this is a “lesbian” novel only in a very limited way. For it is not the lesbian who speaks to us directly, save for a few occasions. Elham Mansour is not writing as a lesbian writer at all, and what we are getting from Siham are not unmediated thoughts but those that are filtered through the ultimate narrator of the story—the non-lesbian author.