Download or read book Beirut 75 written by Ghadah Samman and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 1995-07-01 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lebanon during the war, the lives of five strangers brought together by a communal taxi ride. The protagonists include a woman who gives up teaching in a convent to become a man's mistress, an unemployed individual who becomes a thief, and a fisherman who wants his son to stop studying and enter the family business.

Download or read book Ghada Al samman s Beirut 75 written by George Nicolas El-hage, Ph.d. and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-01-07 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Beirut '75, Ghada al-Samman shockingly depicts the tragic lives of fictitious characters who find themselves in Beirut, Lebanon prior to the outbreak of the war. Heralded by many critics as being a work that prophesied the Lebanese civil war, Beirut '75 is instead a work that expresses the existential and political views of its author and not the complete reality of the socio-political situation at that critical moment in Lebanese history. Even though Ghada al-Samman argues that the work is not autobiographical and that she does not profess any particular political stance, the work is permeated with her political views and her own personal life experience. The city of Beirut, torn between the East and the West, can even be viewed as a metaphor for the author herself.

Download or read book Capturing Freedom s Cry written by Ghada Samman and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing Freedom’s Cry—a translation of I’tikal Lahzah Haribah (Capturing a Fleeting Moment), 1979—is a poetry collection written in Beirut by Ghada Samman during the early years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The poems are set in the violent and destructive environment of this time. They are voiced by female narrators who, in addition to living amid the dangers and horrors of the War itself, engage in a necessary and deeply personal cultural struggle for freedom in a society where patriarchy and oppressive gender roles are the norm. In particular, the female narrators assert their personal power and right to sexual freedom and love. Samman’s advocacy for women’s autonomy and sexual equality, particularly in traditional Arab cultures, is courageous. In exposing the socio-political strife and cultural disparity that oppresses women, Samman demonstrates her conviction that the freedom of the nation and women’s liberation from patriarchal oppression are inseparable.

Download or read book Beirut 75 written by Ghadah Samman and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 1995-07-15 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghada Samman’s first full-length novel, originally published in Arabic in 1974, is a creative and daring work prophetically depicting the social and political causes of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. The story opens in a taxi in which we meet the five central characters, each seeking something to give life meaning: security, fame, wealth, dignity, recognition, freedom from fear and from tradition-sanctioned, dehumanizing practices. Once they reach the capital city of Beirut, on which they’ve pinned their hopes, they all discover, man and woman alike, that they are victims of forces either partially or completely beyond their control, such as political corruption, class discrimination, economic and sexual exploitation, destruction of the natural environment, and blind allegiance to tradition. Beirut ’75 addresses struggles of Arab society, particularly the Lebanese, but the message is one of the universal human condition. Thus, in addition to this superb English-language presentation, Samman’s novel has already appeared in German (two editions), French, and Italian versions. Winner of The University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation.

Download or read book The Night of the First Billion written by Ghada Samman and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-01 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Geneva, Switzerland, around the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, this intricately plotted novel probes the emotional misfortunes of Arab men and women fleeing the horror of war only to find their ways of life constantly challenged by their foreign surroundings. The author's scalding critique of the Lebanese situation resonates with strong sociopolitical issues. Here are telling portraits of class oppression and the role of women in Arab society, the treatments of war and sexuality, of immigration, of cultural assimilation and nationalism. With supreme artistry and insight—and in modern Arab literary fashion—Ghada Samman skillfully blends realism with fantasy into a highly stylized, thematically multilayered tale. It is at once a Gothic romance and a suspenseful whodunit with engaging characters. At the same time it is a gripping study of social injustice and the consequences of wartime upheaval. Far from home and out of harm's way, Samman's Lebanese exiles repeat and replay the very same conflicts that torment them in their own land even as it is under siege. The Night of the First Billion is an eloquent reminder that the only genuine security in the most profound and human sense of the word is to be found in the courageous willingness to confront, challenge, and finally to ease suffering.

Download or read book Woman at Point Zero written by Nawāl Saʻdāwī and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 1983 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So begins Firdaus' story, leading to her grimy Cairo prison cell, where she welcomes her death sentence as a relief from her pain and suffering. Born to a peasant family in the Egyptian countryside, Firdaus suffers a childhood of cruelty and neglect. Her passion for education is ignored by her family, and on leaving school she is forced to marry a much older man. Following her escapes from violent relationships, she finally meets Sharifa who tells her that 'A man does not know a woman's value ... the higher you price yourself the more he will realise what you are really worth' and leads her into a life of prostitution. Desperate and alone, she takes drastic action. -- Publisher description.

Download or read book Capturing Freedom s Cry written by Ghada Samman and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing Freedom's Cry: Arab Women Unveil Their Heart is a poetry collection by Syrian-Lebanese poet and author, Ghada Samman, that is set in the early years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1979). Written in Beirut amid the war's violence and published in Arabic as I'tikal Lahzah Haribah (Capturing a Fleeting Moment), containing over sixty poems, Capturing Freedom's Cry: Arab Women Unveil Their Heart provides a critical insider's perspective into the war's impact on personal and civic life and expresses the poet's contemporaneous experience. Samman unveils a courageous and relentless awareness of what war exacts from love relationships, and the struggle for precise, honest expression in the fleeting and wavering nature of war's intense experience. Embedded within many of Samman's poems is the theme of women's struggle for social and sexual freedom and an unyielding sense of hope and determination to persevere and see the nation return to peace once more. Capturing Freedom's Cry: Arab Women Unveil Their Heart provides a critical insider's perspective into the early years of the Lebanese Civil War. Samman, living in Beirut at the time, chose to stay through much of the war to convey the traumatic effects that conflicting interests, political powers, and societal influences had on life in Lebanon. In Samman's poems, the female narrators often assert their personal power and right to sexual freedom and love. Underlying is a call for a sexual and political revolution where the nation's freedom and women's liberation from patriarchal oppression are inseparable. A woman's longing for her beloved functions as a platform for exposing war's corruption and oppressive social and political ideologies governing women's sexuality. The poems embody an outspoken critique of socio-political strife and cultural disparity that continues to oppress women and use their bodies as political tools for reinforcing patriarchal structures and beliefs. Samman provides readers with an understanding of war that is mirrored by an internal struggle with existing gender roles and social norms embedded in the self. In Capturing Freedom's Cry: Arab Women Unveil Their Heart, Samman's narrators participate in this struggle as they assert their right to love and to own their bodies.

Download or read book Farewell Damascus written by Ghādah Sammān and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Farewell to Damascus is both a paean to a beloved homeland, and an ode to human dignity.

Download or read book Scheherazade Goes West written by Fatema Mernissi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-09-16 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout my childhood, my grandmother Yasmina, who was illiterate and grew up in a harem, repeated that to travel is the best way to learn and to empower yourself. "When a woman decides to use her wings, she takes big risks," she would tell me, but she was convinced that if you didn't use them, it hurt.... So recalls Fatema Mernissi at the outset of her mesmerizing new book. Of all the lessons she learned from her grandmother -- whose home was, after all, a type of prison -- the most central was that the opportunity to cross boundaries was a sacred privilege. Indeed, in journeys both physical and mental, Mernissi has spent virtually all of her life traveling -- determined to "use her wings" and to renounce her gender's alleged legacy of powerlessness. Bursting with the vitality of Mernissi's personality and of her rich heritage, Scheherazade Goes West reveals the author's unique experiences as a liberated, independent Moroccan woman faced with the peculiarities and unexpected encroachments of Western culture. Her often surprising discoveries about the conditions of and attitudes toward women around the world -- and the exquisitely embroidered amalgam of clear-eyed autobiography and dazzling meta-fiction by which she relates those assorted discoveries -- add up to a deliciously wry, engagingly cosmopolitan, and deeply penetrating narrative. In her previous bestselling works, Mernissi -- widely recognized as the world's greatest living Koranic scholar and Islamic sociologist -- has shed unprecedented light on the lives of women in the Middle East. Now, as a writer and scholarly veteran of the high-wire act of straddling disparate societies, she trains her eyes on the female culture of the West. For her book's inspired central metaphor, Mernissi turns to the ancient Islamic tradition of oral storytelling, illuminating her grandmother's feminized, subversive, and highly erotic take on Scheherazade's wife-preserving tales from The Arabian Nights -- and then ingeniously applying them to her own lyrically embellished personal narrative. Interwoven with vivid ruminations on her childhood, her education, and her various international travels are the author's piquant musings on a range of deeply embedded societal conditions that add up, Mernissi argues, to a veritable "Western harem." A provocative and lively challenge to the common assumption that women have it so much better in the West than anywhere else in the world, Mernissi's book is an entrancing and timely look at the way we live here and now. By inspiring us to reconsider even the most commonplace aspects of our culture with fresh eyes and a healthy dose of suspicion, Scheherazade Goes West offers an invigorating, candid, and entertaining new perspective on the themes and ideas to which Betty Friedan first turned us on nearly forty years ago.

Download or read book Women and the War Story written by Miriam Cooke and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a book that radically and fundamentally revises the way we think about war, Miriam Cooke charts the emerging tradition of women's contributions to what she calls the "War Story," a genre formerly reserved for men. Concentrating on the contemporary literature of the Arab world, Cooke looks at how alternatives to the master narrative challenge the authority of experience and the permission to write. She shows how women who write themselves and their experiences into the War Story undo the masculine contract with violence, sexuality, and glory. There is no single War Story, Cooke concludes; the standard narrative—and with it the way we think about and conduct war—can be changed. As the traditional time, space, organization, and representation of war have shifted, so have ways of describing it. As drug wars, civil wars, gang wars, and ideological wars have moved into neighborhoods and homes, the line between combat zones and safe zones has blurred. Cooke shows how women's stories contest the acceptance of a dyadically structured world and break down the easy oppositions—home vs. front, civilian vs. combatant, war vs. peace, victory vs. defeat—that have framed, and ultimately promoted, war.

Download or read book Anxiety of Erasure written by Hanadi Al-Samman and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far from offering another study that bemoans Arab women’s repression and veiling, Anxiety of Erasure looks at Arab women writers living in the diaspora who have translated their experiences into a productive and creative force. In this book, Al-Samman articulates the therapeutic effects of revisiting forgotten histories and of activating two cultural tropes: that of the maw’udah (buried female infant) and that of Shahrazad in the process of revolutionary change. She asks what it means to develop a national, gendered consciousness from diasporic locals while staying committed to the homeland. Al-Samman presents close readings of the fiction of six prominent authors whose works span over half a century and define the current status of Arab diaspora studies—Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamida al-Na‘na‘, Hoda Barakat, Samar Yazbek, and Salwa al-Neimi. Exploring the journeys in time and space undertaken by these women, Anxiety of Erasure shines a light on the ways in which writers remain participants in their homelands’ intellectual lives, asserting both the traumatic and the triumphant aspects of diaspora. The result is a nuanced Arab women’s poetic that celebrates rootlessness and rootedness, autonomy and belonging.

Download or read book Arab Women Writers written by Raḍwá ʻĀshūr and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arab women's writing in the modern age began with 'A'isha al-Taymuriya, Warda al-Yaziji, Zaynab Fawwaz, and other nineteenth-century pioneers in Egypt and the Levant. This unique study-first published in Arabic in 2004-looks at the work of those pioneers and then traces the development of Arab women's literature through the end of the twentieth century, and also includes a meticulously researched, comprehensive bibliography of writing by Arab women. In the first section, in nine essays that cover the Arab Middle East from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Yemen, critics and writers from the Arab world examine the origin and evolution of women's writing in each country in the region, addressing fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiographical writing. The second part of the volume contains bibliographical entries for over 1,200 Arab women writers from the last third of the nineteenth century through 1999. Each entry contains a short biography and a bibliography of each author's published works. This section also includes Arab women's writing in French and English, as well as a bibliography of works translated into English. With its broad scope and extensive research, this book is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in Arabic literature, women's studies, or comparative literature. Contributors: Emad Abu Ghazi, Radwa Ashour, Mohammed Berrada, Ferial J. Ghazoul, Subhi Hadidi, Haydar Ibrahim, Yumna al-'Id, Su'ad al-Mani', Iman al-Qadi, Amina Rachid, Huda al-Sadda, Hatim al-Sakr.

Download or read book Days of Ignorance written by Laila Aljohani and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is he dead? Medina, Saudi Arabia. A young man, Malek, has been brutally attacked for being of the 'wrong' race. Malek's lover, Leen, waits by his bedside and reflects on their relationship and her life as an unmarried, childless woman. All around her are voices of judgment and concern; in the twenty-first century it is still unforgivable, and dangerous, for a Saudi woman to enter into a relationship with a black man. In the distance US planes hover over Iraq, primed to embark on yet another senseless conflict. Malek's attacker was Leen's brother. Flinging wide a window onto the second holiest Islamic city – a city in which people observe daily prayers and preach equality and justice – Days of Ignorance is a novel about honour, hypocrisy, war and fear. And, glimmering beyond, beneath and behind it all, love.

Download or read book Women Claim Islam written by Miriam Cooke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative collection addresses the ways in which Arab women writers are using Islam to empower themselves, and theorizes the conditions that have made the appearance of these new voices possible.

Download or read book Artists Writers and The Arab Spring written by Riad Ismat and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-14 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book aims to explore the foresight of prominent Middle Eastern authors and artists who anticipated the Arab Spring, which resulted in demands for change in the repressive and corrupted regimes. Eventually, it led to cracking down on the protests with excessive force, which caused tremendous human suffering, destruction, and also escalation of extreme insurgency. The author analyzes major literary and artistic works from Egypt, Syria and Tunisia, and their political context. This monograph will be helpful to scholars and students in the growing field of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and everyone who is interested in the politics of MENA.

Download or read book The Experimental Arabic Novel written by Stefan G. Meyer and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the development of the modern Arabic novel from the 1960s to the present.

Download or read book All That s Left to You written by Ghassan Kanafani and published by Interlink Books. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vivid story of twenty-four hours in the real and remembered lives of a brother and sister living in Gaza and separated from their family. Ghassan Kanafani’s writings are among the most influential in modern Palestinian literature. In his novels, short stories, and plays, he explores complex political questions encased in beautiful narratives and lyrical prose. All That's Left to You presents the vivid story of twenty-four hours in the real and remembered lives of a brother and sister living in Gaza and separated from their family. The desert and time emerge as characters as Kanafani speaks through the desert, the brother, and the sister to build the powerful rhythm of the narrative. The Palestinian attachment to land and family, and the sorrow over their loss, are symbolized by the young man’s unremitting anger and shame over his sister’s sexual disgrace. This remarkable collection of stories provides evidence to the English-reading public of Kanafani’s position within modern Arabic literature. Not only was he committed to portraying the miseries and aspirations of his people, the Palestinians, in whose cause he died, but he was also an innovator within the extensive world of Arabic fiction.