eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520918092 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 309 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Women and the War Story
By Miriam Cooke
University of California Press
Copyright © 1997 Miriam CookeAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520206137
Introduction
I was born in 1948, the year of the war between the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews that culminated in the establishment of the state of Israel. My brother was born in 1956, the year of the war in Suez. In 1967, a few months after the Six-Day War, I went to Edinburgh University to study Arabic. Two years later I spent the summer and fall in a Lebanon still shaken by its first serious military encounter with its southern neighbor. In 1980 I returned to Lebanon as a stringer for the London-based Middle East magazine. I chose to interview women, particularly those who had written on their five-year-old war. The interviews led to a book-length project, and I went back two years later to collect more material. During my stay the Israelis invaded and dropped bombs all around the area in which I was staying. I went back the next year to collect the books that I had had to leave in my hurry. Then, when I had finished writing War's Other Voices and was ready to move on, I realized that I could not, that the project had become so much part of me that I could not just turn my back on it. I wanted to know how what I had done fitted into the larger scheme. And so I started to read novels and poetry about the wars in Algeria, Vietnam, Iraq, and the Israeli-occupiedterritories.
A life in a paragraph organized by violence: I arrange the dots that draw me around the spaces of Middle Eastern wars. Why do I not include in this dot outline the first man on the moon? The first flight of Concorde? Then I remember Wilfred Owen. It is 1960, adank afternoon in May when I, a twelve-year-old in the Tunbridge Wells County Grammar School for Girls, am asked to read out a poem. At first, haltingly because I have not had time to scan the text and then breathlessly as I tumble through the lines that from that day become part of my life . . .
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on blood-shod. . . .
. . . deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. . . .
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's full of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the forth-corrupted lungs . . .
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
This poem tied me to a man twice my age whose agony seared my innocence. Today I look back fondly on that surprised child and an anguished young man, now half my age, and I marvel at the power of his words that have made him my friend. The pacifist physicist Freeman Dyson was surely right when he wrote that if "we are searching for meaning in a world of shifting standards, literature is one place where we can find it. All of us have periods in our lives when meaning is lost, and other periods when it is found again. It is an inescapable part of the human condition to be borrowing meaning from one another" (Dyson 1985, 299–300). The tragedy of the poem is the story it tells but also the fate of the poet whose death for his country was neither sweet nor appropriate. Forty years after his death, Wilfred handed me his poem, and now thirty years later I am trying to borrow meaning from this fragment that survives, trying to understand how his opposition from within the war sheds light on what, throughout my life, women halfway across the world have been writing on war. Does their participation give them a special right to speak?
More than most human activities, war has been considered the literary purview of those few who have experienced combat. Those who had not been at the front had no authority to speak of the dead and dying. Women, therefore, clearly had no right to speak. Yet what of Helen Zenna Smith, who wrote Not So Quiet . . . in 1930, or Stephen Crane, who wrote Red Badge of Courage in 1895? Neither writer had even approached a war zone, and both works have been hailed as stunning exemplars of war fiction that vividly evoke the experiences of combatants and their caretakers. These two novels suggest that experience does not necessarily bestow authority. I take my cue.
And yet, in this world increasingly split between North and South, between a homogenizing global culture and myriad resistance movements, how can an American woman write about Arab women without privileging herself as norm? In 1980, when I began to work on Arab women's writings on the Lebanese civil war, my colleagues' only objection was the value of the enterprise: did I really want to waste my time on these dames de salon? Now, however, things have changed. As Arab women's writings are increasingly translated into all the major, and even not so major, languages of the world and some Arab women are receiving a recognition that few of their male colleagues have enjoyed, all feminist criticism on Arabic literature is coming under investigation. Western feminists have been criticized for viewing women from the South as victims bound by a shared oppression at the hands of an undifferentiated patriarchy. Their interventions in the affairs of Asian and African women, their outrages at the inflicting of what they consider to be harmful cultural practices, such as veiling, clitoridectomy and foot binding have been linked to Euro-American cultural imperialism. Is there a way to work together without suspicion and silencing?
My answer has been to focus on literature because it allows for the articulation of individual women's different experiences, beliefs, choices, and aspirations. Clearly I am implicated in what Chandra Mohanty calls the "global hegemony of western scholarship—i.e., the production, publication, distribution, and consumption of information and ideas" (Mohanty 1991, 55). I acknowledge that I aminterested in those moments of women's empowerment, though they seem to be invisible. Above all, I believe in the power of women's oppositional discourses wherever they happen. My work is premised on the hope that women's contestatory narratives can create alternative spaces and that in these new spaces conflicts may be resolved without automatic resort to organized and lethal violence.
Women and the War Story is about wars and gender in the contemporary literature of the Arab world. It attempts to situate Arab wars and primarily women's writings about them in a cross-cultural context. It is clearly a sequel to War's Other Voices , but it is also a departure from it in that it interrogates more deeply the conditions that enable the production of particular kinds of war texts. In the earlier work I spoke about women who wrote unconventionally about the Lebanese war. They told a story of chaos, not of revolution, of daily surviving, not of relentless hatred and fighting. Their stories opened up for me a new way of reading about other wars in the Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century: the Algerian war of independence from the French 1954–62; the Palestinian-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967 and the Intifada (1987–93); and the Iraq-Iran War 1980–88. This literature inscribes the changes in the experience and expression of war from the colonial to the postcolonial period.
Women and the War Story suggests that there is no one history, no one story about war, that has greater claim to truth but that history is made up of multiple stories, many of them herstories, which emanate from and then reconstruct events. Each story told by someone who experienced a war, or by someone who saw someone who experienced a war, or by someone who read about someone who saw someone who experienced a war, becomes part of a mosaic the many colors and shapes of which make up the totality of that war. Yet however exhaustive my research and reach, I cannot encompass this totality: I can always only tell an individual story.
I am interested in the choices that Arab women make as they pick up their pens to write about their experiences in wars others declare they have lived as noncombatants. How do they begin to imagine narratives that do not fit the mold of the War Story? How does the way they position themselves affect the knowledge they produceand their right to express it? How do they challenge the archetypes of the Mater Dolorosa, the Patriotic Mother, the Spartan Mother, or the Amazon? How can such iconoclasts then fashion a new persona: the woman who has lived war not as a victim but as a survivor, who may not have borne arms but who has played all the other roles a war culture prescribes? Should she submit her experiences to others' labeling? How can she force others to acknowledge the variety of roles she has taken in what is supposed to be a men-only domain? How can she guarantee that this time she will not find herself written out of the War Story and civic belonging? It is not merely whim that drives women everywhere to claim their war experiences as combat. It is the growing understanding of the ways in which patriarchy seizes and then articulates women's experiences so that they will be seem to be marginal and apolitical that now drives women as creative artists and as critics to re-member their pasts and then to write them.
I am looking in postcolonial Arab war literature for alternatives to the master narrative of war. I have spent the past thirteen years studying the emergence of an imagined community of oppositional writers. With Benedict Anderson and Chandra Mohanty I use the term "imagined community" to point out how people forge alliances that are neither biological nor cultural but political, to form what Mohanty calls a "common context of struggle . . . [for r]esistance is encoded in the practices of remembering and of writing." As Algerian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi women re-member their experiences in war and then write of its dailiness, they figure their agency (Mohanty 1991, 7, 38). As I interpret these writings I inscribe them further into a global movement of women's empowerment. Women who have had experiences that have changed their conceptions of who they are must write to inscribe their transformed consciousness. Women must fight to retain the authority to write about an experience that they are supposed not to have had.
In chapter one, "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm," I discuss the persistence of the War Story, a narrative frame that has formillennia shaped the articulation of the war experience. I try to account for its influence on the waging of war as well as on the gender composition of the military. I have been struck by the parallels between women writing about war and women entering into the military. In each case, women who have traditionally been associated with peace are intervening in wars and revealing that the ways in which war stories have been told were deeply flawed. These women who fight with weapons or with their determination to survive or with their pens draw attention to what they are doing and how they are changing the norms. I compare the perceived role of enlisted women with that of mother warriors. These are women—not necessarily actual mothers—who have used the role of mother to enter public space whence they demand justice. These women, who are not substituting for male fighters but who have evolved their own way of fighting, are demanding that the meanings attached to war experience be reviewed and revised. Finally, I connect the military women and the self-styled women combatants with women writers who have scripted multiple stories about the wars in which they have participated. I ask whether acknowledgement of women's presence in what was considered to be no-woman's land (Higonnet 1993) will make a difference to the ways in which wars are narrated and consequently fought in the future.
In chapter two, "Culture Degree Zero," I describe ways in which the conduct, constitution, and above all the representation of war have changed in the nuclear age. The role of film and the media has been critical to altering the historical debates about the meanings, causes, and cures of war. Such is the case because until recently the reality of war was said to precede and thus to be separate from its representation. This is no longer possible. I analyze aspects of the representation of the war in Vietnam to make connections between other oppositions crucial to the War Story, for example, combatant and civilian; beginnings and endings. The very category of war is destabilized as it is shown to be integral to what was thought to be its opposite, namely, peace. Wars today are called civil, revolutionary, drug, gang, feudal, ideological, but they are linked by the fact that they refuse the easy oppositions that had marked, in fact constituted, the War Story. There are risks attendant on the dismantling of the War Story. Why go to war if victory and defeat are not clear-cut, mutually exclusive concepts? Low-intensity conflict may spill into a non-militarized zone, but people still need to believe in the separation of space into dangerous front—men's space—and danger-free home—women's space. And then who would venture into battle if there were doubt about the goodness and loyalty of troops and allies and the total evil of the enemy? People's beliefs, hopes, and needs notwithstanding, the reality, or better the realities, of nuclear age wars fly in the face of such distortions. Those who continue to function in terms of black and white categorizations are neither mad nor stupid, they are nostalgic. They long for a world that I suspect never existed; it allocated special terrain for fighting and designated safe space. Certainties of space imparted other assurances about identity in terms of gender, class, and nationalism. So critical have these identities been to sane survival in an insane world that ambiguity and ambivalence in experience were obstinately recast as certainties.
Chapter three, "Silence Is the Real Crime," compares men's and women's writings on the Algerian war of independence. This war was widely acclaimed for mobilizing women into the revolutionary forces. How did contemporary writers assess women's participation as it was happening? Although women writers gradually came to write about the war, at the time they were more concerned with issues like gender inequality. The war would have seemed to open up opportunities to escape or even to change such a fate. It did not. The women did not know how to profit from their war experiences—nor indeed that they might do so. In the absence of a concerted attempt on the women's part to change their conditions, the men quickly established a neotraditional system that deprived the women of any voice. Literary evidence supports a recent contention that Algerian women were not so much forced back into oppression as they were blocked from pursuing opportunities they did not at the time recognize. Even feminist writers like Djamila Dibhche and Assia Djebar did not describe the war as liberating. Why? Algerian women did not have a feminist context within which to situate their struggle. The revolution came too soon in the history of modern Arab women's activism to be recognized as acatalyst for the inscription of feminist issues into the nationalist agenda. War was declared an opportunity that women had failed to exploit. Ironically the men, among them Mohamed Dib and Malek Haddad, wrote with anxiety about women's growing roles and strength during the war. A comparison of women's and men's writings suggests why women were disempowered in the aftermath. The women did not realize and certainly did not write about their potential social transformation. The men did write and they acted on their writing. It was only in the 1980s, when the fundamentalist Front Islamique de Salut and their armed counterparts began to mount lethal attacks in their war against their secular government and nonobservant civilians, that Algerian women began to learn the lessons of those—like the Iranian and Palestinian women—who had learned the Algerian Lesson: silence is the real crime.
Chapter four, "Talking Democracy," considers the writings of Palestinian women during two periods immediately following Israeli occupations, the first in 1948 and the next in 1967 leading to the Intifada. These writings exemplify within one literature how women shifted from acting and writing like men to adopt a woman-centered behavior and discourse. Unlike other colonized peoples, Palestinians experienced renewed colonialism in a period said to be beyond it. When the British left in the late 1940s, European refugees replaced them. Some Palestinians remained, and for them the relationship with the occupiers was complex. Were they new neighbors or enemies? Palestinian men and women writers of this period reflect great ambivalence about the Israelis as well as about their own status and future. The major concerns are survival with dignity and the establishment of a just if patriarchal society. The literary reaction to the defeat of 1967 was quite different. Five years after the end of the Algerian revolution, Palestinians were invoking its lessons: the importance of the use of violence in the struggle for independence; the indispensability of women to national liberation. Palestinian women writers took the latter a step further to claim that not only were women as actors indispensable to the nationalist revolution but so was feminism as an ideology of radical social change. The poetry, autobiographies, novels, and short stories of Fadwa Tuqan, Sahar Khalifa, and Halima Jauhar early draw thecontours of the Intifada. This popular uprising derived its name from the term the women had been using for twenty years to describe their women-specific ways of resisting the occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. The women writers demonstrate how the conventional binary structures thought to be proper to war no longer pertained despite valiant attempts to hold on to them. Men's writings, mirroring women's literary assessments of men's political actions and attitudes, seem oblivious to the new strategies and realities.
In chapter five, "Flames of Fire in Qadisiya," I consider the writings of one of the major global conflicts of the 1980s, the Iraq-Iran War. Most of this literature, like most of the art produced under the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, was state-commissioned often before the events they were supposed to celebrate and commemorate had actually taken place. Conferences were held to give a platform to this new literature. So insular and preoccupied were Iraqi writers with their project that they debated the term "war literature" as though they were the first to invent it. Some artists collaborated with the government: victory monuments were constructed before any victory was in sight, martyr monuments were conceived before the war. Were they producing art or propaganda? Can they claim innocence of collaboration with an evil regime? What are we to make of the writer's responsibility to society? Can patronized but also terrorized writers question the validity of a patriotic war? How do we read such texts? Many men did not hold back as they touted the glories of the war. The women, however, were not so easily co-opted. Daisy al-Amir, Suhayla Salman, Lutfiya al-Dulaymi, and 'Aliya Talib ventured cautious recognitions of the hollowness of victory and of martyrdom. They even interrogated the ways in which propaganda was made and used against Iraqi citizens. These women were able to overcome atomization and retain the sense of responsibility that some claimed all Iraqi writers enlisted into state service had lost.
Chapter six, "Reimagining Lebanon," turns to the civil war in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of 1982. Women like Huda Barakat and Nur Salman, who had not written about the war until that point, join others like Emily Nasrallah, who wrote throughout,to urge the national importance of remaining on the soil of Lebanon. In their texts they have begun to fashion a new form of nationalism—what I call humanist nationalism—that does not predicate itself on the existence of a state. They are deliberately writing against the grain of the War Story. I have chosen to conclude Women and the War Story with a return to my earlier interest but at a later period so as to frame the question of war in the postcolonial period. To use the Lebanese war as a prism is to acknowledge its difference from these other wars but also its centrality to their interpretation.
Two of these wars were considered by their women participants to be "just," the other two were not. The Algerians had to rise up as a people against the French if they were to gain independence; the Palestinians, particularly in the post-1967 period, realized that they had to unite against the Israelis if they were to regain some form of homeland. In contrast, the Iraqi people found themselves in a war they could not understand against a people they were not sure they hated. The same was true for many Lebanese who recognized that their internecine chaos served no one but the war profiteers. In each conflict women became involved and wanted their role to be acknowledged. When they supported the nationalist cause, they assumed that their unprecedented contribution would reap its own automatic rewards. When it did not, these women later struggled for recognition. In Iraq and Lebanon the women writers described the wars in which their countries were embroiled as being unjustifiably destructive. They resisted the violence, working against a system they understood to be responsible for perpetuating the war. They drew attention to the falseness of the rhetoric used to mobilize the population as well as to the fact that this system was mostly managed by men. They tried to change what was happening by resisting as women and by showing how effective were their different forms of resistance. Their stories describe the reality underlying and contradicting the nationalist rhetoric.
Study of the literature of these four wars reveals that the date of their occurrence is very important. The situation of women in the anticolonial war is different from that of women in postcolonial wars. In the 1950s and early 1960s Algerian and Palestinian womenin Israel considered themselves to be exceptionally part of a political movement. They fought as the men did, and their goal was to liberate the country, not to change society. The situation of Iraqi and Lebanese women, and Palestinian women in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the late 1970s and 1980s, provides a stark contrast. These women all write of fighting for their country but they do not give priority to the political. For them, the social takes precedence. They have seen that victory in the political sphere has no necessary connection with societal change; political victory brings few if any advantages to the lives of the people. Yet political mobilization provides opportunities for change because it is there that ad hoc social accommodations must begin to create the climate for political success. Women in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s recognize the social possibilities inherent in political resistance and bring to their war participation the awareness that if political victory is to have any meaning at all, it must entail social transformation. Armed with this awareness, these women improvise ways of participating that are unlike those of their male counterparts, ways that do not negate their identities as women. Their resistance becomes self-consciously feminine. They insist on this difference in activism while emphasizing the commonality of the goal. These women write out of their own experiences, transforming the meanings others have traditionally attached to what they have done and to who they are, demanding recognition at the time of participation. They write to express their own needs and link these with the needs of their country, which is both a political entity and a community of precious individuals.
In these postcolonial wars, women generally criticize men's ways of fighting regardless of their personal attitudes to the war in question. They object to the ways in which men have generally overlooked their involvement, whether active or passive. Their writings show how women wage peace, in other words how women fight for justice without necessarily engaging in destruction. They may see aggression to be necessary, but they propose new ways, strategies, and targets. Sometimes they try to reveal ways in which some form of resolution can be reached without resort to lethal violence. Their stories allow us to ask new questions. For example,would the Palestinian-Israeli peace process—however volatile its current incarnation—have been conceivable without the Intifada, and would the Intifada have been possible had the women for years not invented new ways of resisting without arms?
In this world of shifting standards I borrow meaning from these women. I build my story on foundations they have laid. My hope for myself and for all embarked on this venture, this cultural crossing, is that a recognition of our own strangeness will not serve to silence but will rather allow for the proliferation of multiple stories each of which will contribute to the flourishing of shared understandings based on mutual respect.
Continues...
Excerpted from Women and the War Story by Miriam Cooke Copyright © 1997 by Miriam Cooke. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.