The Wounds of War and Conflict in Contemporary Arab Women's Writings from North Africa and the Middle East
Brinda J. Mehta
Synopsis "The Wounds of War and Conflict in Contemporary Arab Women's Writings from North Africa and the Middle East"
The Wounds of War highlights the capacity of the literary arts and Arab women''s feminist writings to project, critique, and complicate what has happened and what is still happening to women in sites of violation because of war and continuing political instability, unchecked sexual trauma, health politics, and other insecurities. The women''s gendered forms of resistance highlight their strength, resilience, and agency. The book stands out for the range of materials it includes from several countries (Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen) and genres (plays, novels, memoirs, poetry, and testimonials).
The Wounds of War and Conflict in Contemporary Arab Women''s Writings from North Africa and the Middle East focuses on the writings of women authors from North Africa and the Middle East who open a critical and alternative imaginary of war and displacement in their literary production. Their voices underscore the capacity of the literary arts to project, critique, and complicate what has happened and what is still happening to women in these sites of violation because of war and continuing political instability, unchecked sexual trauma, health politics, and other insecurities. Emerging from a situation of urgency, The Wounds of War makes a much-needed postcolonial feminist literary and cultural intervention in traditional narratives of war and anti-war protest by filling the glaring gaps and omissions embedded in the MENA region''s “war stories” through its emphasis on the writings of women. With its focus on North Africa and the Middle East, The Wounds of War establishes the legacy of Arab women''s anti-war resistance in the MENA region''s literary and cultural arts. It discusses how women survive war through gendered forms of resistance that highlight their strength, courage, and agency. This highly sensorial language is scarred by war wounds and poetic lament to reveal its expressivity in compelling texts that highlight the liminal spaces between loss and recovery, memory and amnesia, submission and resistance, and survival and death in delimiting war zones. Literature provides testimony and denunciation in the face of war''s wanton destructiveness by unveiling the bloodied synergies between biopower, war wounds, gender, and Arab women''s anti-war feminist resistance in prose, poetry, theatre, memoirs, and testimonial writing. Narrative enjambments underscore the “unrepresentable” dimensions of creativity that can articulate the horrors of war and conflict in Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine.
