2.3.

1 Reading A Sister to Scheherazade and So Long a Letter

To facilitate a more integral overview of the disparate conditions shaping the destinies

of contemporary women in the Islamic world of the Maghreb, North Africa and the

Middle East, this section considers the above works of Djebar and Ba. A

comparative/ contrastive reading will help to assess the degree to which women's

subjective testimonies, articulated textually in Sister and Letter, have shed light on the

historically devalued female experiences. In the process the study strives to configure

the extent to which the recovery of women's presence through their testimonies has

produced positive results for women in specific locations. The texts will also be used to

demonstrate how centuries-long patriarchal ideologies, beliefs and practices (such as

coerced veiling, polygamy and seclusion of women) impact upon the present, and

contribute to women's further disempowerment in the postcolonial situation.

Western philosophical discourse, dominated by the thoughts of men, has

historically conceived the world in terms of hierarchies and oppositions, as

presence/absence, culture/nature, identity/difference, Self/Other and so on. 36 In this

aesthetic of difference meaning is derived not purely through antithesis but through a

strategically established dichotomy and hierarchization between terms within a unit that

necessitates a consideration of oppositions as mutually inclusive and interdependent.

The feminine in the phallogocentric world of logic and philosophy has always been subordinated by
the masculine presence (the dominant terminology of the unit) to the

extent that until about the mid-20th century, women (with a few exceptions) have been

excluded from the production of speech and writing.

Importantly, this phenomenon has not been exclusive to the West. In the

postcolonial context also, until recent times, the written text has been the prerogative

of male writers whose gendered representations of their (mostly) nationalist narratives

have limited women's roles to iconic goddesses, fetishized mothers and idolized wives.

Similarly, if we read the works of many postcolonial women writers we are made aware

of instances where varying sociocultural and political conditions have suppressed women

from textual self-representation. As Farzaneh Milani discloses in a study of Iranian

women writers, women's self-representation "is not divorced from their cultural

representation; and in a culture [or cultures for that matter] that idealizes feminine
silence and restraint, not many women can or will opt for breaking the silence. s31 While

women's aphasia is a predominant feature of the sexually segregated communities in

the Maghreb, the Middle East and parts of Africa (not to mention parts of Asia), there

are also unique exceptions where traditional crafts such as storytelling, ritualistic

dances and trances, singing and chanting have been used effectively by women to break

the silence of the once muted voices of history.

Carving out a literary space for themselves, the works of postcolonial women

from Asia and Africa to the Caribbean and Latin America configure alternative ways of

perceiving gender relations (without simply reversing or endorsing old hierarchies),

articulating women's diverse experiences - the "wounds" of often mutilated memories,

and creating a greater consciousness of experiences specific to women. Within a

Derridean framework, such configurations have led to deconstructive processes where

oppositions are re-evaluated and meanings often reversed, reconstructed or destabilized

to produce sometimes radically different perspectives. The aim of many women writers

has been to transcend existing realities and conceive an alternative knowledge that has

positive implications for women. This consciousness on the part of women has been an

important stepping stone for a reassessment and reinterpretation of traditional mores

and customs, legal and other rights affecting women's lives in many parts of the

developing world.

In Sister and Letter, the authors place two women in central positions as

narrators of their texts to relate the histories of women facing victimization in their

respective patrilineal worlds. The privileged positions they occupy give them access to the written
word and to textual space on which they inscribe their subjective positions

that is vital for the recovery of their selfhood. For these women, writing becomes a

fruitful area of resistance to power and to monolithic constructs of selfhood. As Simon

Gikandi puts it lucidly: "To write is to claim a text of one's own ...

because the other

confers on us an identity that alienates us from ourselves, narrative is crucial to the

discovery of our selfhood. s38 While endorsing this point, it would help to perceive if

these characters (as well as the authors) in recovering the narratives of victimization,

use their subject positions in ways that are generally enabling and empowering for
women. In other words, while it is clear that women's fiction has created a greater

awareness of women's issues, it needs to be ascertained to what extent (and here I cite

Shoshana Felman) "otherness can be taken for granted as positively occupying the unthought-

out, problematical locus from which the statement is being uttered" (10).

As highlighted in the introduction to the thesis (see Section 1.2 in particular),

many questions arise in attempting to address this aspect of the debate. Who is

victimized and how do they overcome oppressive circumstances? Is there recovery and

revisioning in the process? We need to explore whether the texts provide a site of

protest, a site which asserts the writer's power of communication, and from which the

writer can reinvent language and history (by speaking through silences or body

movements or dreams, by using the technique of the palimpsest, or narrative devices

such as the mirasse which Bä employs in Letter). We also need to trace whether the

strategies in women's fiction have given adequate focus "to the changing ideological

and material situations in which the evolution of literary myth takes place"; that is, the

text should be read in relation to "shifting historical situation[s] in which literary

redefinitions and evolutions [unfold]. s39 Indeed, such a study should necessarily

consider the complex link between the text and its many contexts that include the

sociocultural, political and historical.