Naguib Mahfouz: A Western and Eastern Cage of Female Entrapment ...

Writers with the need to tell their stories have begun to use their histories to respond to the difficulties of oppression and the aftermath of destruction and tragedy. Reading about these authors’ struggles enables Westerners to appreciate not only the struggles of other cultural groups but also the value of their writing. The difficulty, however, is that the West has not always read such sensitively penned prose with receptivity and comparable intellectual honesty.

Middle Eastern literature often brews in tormenting periods of unrest and political upheaval. For instance, Samira Azzam, a Palestinian born in Jaffa, was “widely read, and very active in Lebanese and Palestinian cultural life,” as revealed by Badran and Cooke in Opening the Gates, an anthology of female Arab authors. Furthermore, she “published her short stories in a number of journals, including Al-Adab.” She learned of the fall of Jerusalem when “she arrived at Allenby Bridge to return to Palestine after living in Beirut for many years. Unfortunately, she had a heart attack and died on the bridge” (54). Azzam’s journals stimulated realistic depictions of life as described in her short stories. Such stories by Middle Eastern authors, finally beginning to grow in interest to a general reading public, help people of other cultures understand the authors’ lives, drama, and oppression.

Another female writer from Egypt who experienced extreme oppression because of her status as a woman is Alifa Rifaat. Since her father did not believe in education for girls, he did not permit her to attend art school. Instead, he forced her into marriage with her cousin, according to Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke in Opening the Gates. Alifa wrote her first short story at nine years of age but did not publish it until she was seventeen. Badran and Cooke provide a short vignette of this ordeal: “Her story ‘My Secret World’ attracted considerable attention, which led her husband to forbid her from writing. She complied in that she did not publish her stories, but she continued to write them in the privacy of her bathroom. After his death in 1974, she published eighteen short stories, most of them in the literary journal Al-Thaqafa al-Usbuiya” (72).