Your history, my narrative: uncovering me through you

Abstract

This paper examines three books, Khul-Khaal, Doing Daily Battle and Both Right and Left Handed (BRLH), all of which were published in the 1980s. Their sub-titles, Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories, Interviews with Moroccan Women and Arab Women Talk About Their Lives respectively, indicate that all three books contain life stories of women from Arab countries. These books, then, fall into one category, not only because of their subject matter but also because they raise similar sets of questions relating to their technique and conditions of production. The paper offers a critique of the process of stereotyping and generalization drawn from these anthologies by the authors/editors themselves, as in Khul-Khaal, and comment on how readers also tend to generalize even without editorial prompting (a process discussed later when analyzing the other two texts.) Nonetheless, these same texts, read carefully, can be potentially good sources of knowledge. This paper does not read these anthologies ethnographically, that is, it does not take the interviewee as typical of Arab culture, which is known to be too complex to be represented by these women alone. However, some conclusions, which necessarily entail some kind of generalization, about how a common culture affects self-image, can be drawn. Common culture here does not refer to a monolithic Arab culture as such but to the similar social and economic conditions which some of the women share. This paper also examines how class and economic positions interact with gender in these anthologies and produce different forms of oppression. Any generalizations in this paper should not be harmful nor should they entail the risk of stereotyping involved in the cruder kinds of ethnographic reading.

Keywords

• mujeres árabes
• cultura árabe
• imagen
• opresión
• estereotipo
• género