Shout of Silence

In

the Selected Fictional Works by Souif, Nafisi, Aly and Kahf

Abstract

The research aims at analyzing the works

of the selected writers and to shed light on the

issues of women in the foreign community

especially which are related to culture,

religion, customs and traditions, and how the new

society see these new immigrants. It also

analyses the conflict of identity, the division

of belonging and the clashes between the

cultures. The fictional works also deal with the

forbidden cases, the domination of the society

values of men and focus on the sufferings of

women as a result of these values such as crimes

of honor. The writers try to convey the shouts of

help which their protagonists release during

their confusion which result from their escape

from the society which deprives them of the human

relations between the two sexes and even their

simplest rights and the absence of the male

understanding in the new society, moreover their

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suffering because of Alienation and exploitation.

Although the target is the western reader, the

themes and context is eastern and oriental,

showing them in the phase of being tested with

the clash of civilizations. This research also

aims at gaining sympathy, support and

understanding to the sufferings of the Arabian

and the Muslim woman and her struggle, so these

novels are a shout of protest and a symbolic

haven of salvation.

Keywords: Feminism, protest, domination,

emancipation, shout, silence and submission.

Introduction

The protagonists in the selected novels,

Ahdaf Souif's Aisha (1983), Azar Nafisi's Reading

Lolita in Tehran (2003), Monica Aly's Brick Lane (2004)

and Mohja Kahf's The Girl in Tangerine Scarf (2006),

have passed through the same circumstances in the

different communities they moved to. The novels

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show the sufferings women face in their lives

especially from the male characters surrounding

them. All the women in the novels have suppressed

shouts that they need to release, but they are

unable to do so because of the oppression imposed

upon them only for being women. They struggle

throughout their lives for their emancipation

whether in their native countries or when they

immigrate to other countries. They seem to be

exposed to the same problems that face them.

All what they can do is just to

shout but silently because still nobody really

cares about them. The selected novels are a right

trend towards achieving women equality with men.

These novels allow their protagonists to talk,

condemn, and shout. Most women in these societies

suffered from the same circumstances that’s why

all their demands are similar. Although the

writers come from different countries and

different cultural backgrounds, they still have

the same feelings and thoughts.

The novels are symbolic shouts of

certain ladies who lived under years of

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submission and pressures. It is time for them to

breathe the air of freedom, and escape from the

cage. These novels are one of the several ways

women begin on the way of achieving complete

emancipation. They left no stone unturned to

convey their message and to achieve improvement

in their lawful demands.

Researcher Background

This research is intended to analyze

some novels written by contemporary female

writers from different cultural backgrounds and

analyzing their major works according to the

concepts of feminist theory. It explores the

integration of feminist movement in examining

women’s issues and addressing them in literature

to gain the whole attention to the silence

imposed on women in certain societies of the

world and trying to find resort and haven for

their shouts. It also tries to address the issues

of women who have always been subjects to

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oppression, aggression, domination of men

throughout the different ages.

The interest in women’s rights started

at the beginning of the 20th century and some

movements appeared throughout the globe demanding

complete rights of women like men including equal

pay for equal work, the right to vote in

elections, the right to have partners in private

business, the right of education, and the right

to participate in the social and political life.

Most of these movements achieved great success

especially after supporting them with articles,

books, and films.

During the Second World War, in the

United States when most men had to fight in other

countries, leaving behind them wives and children

with no enough food or money, women broke into

farms, factories and hospitals and began to do

men’s job and achieved great success in all

fields of life. After the war, there were radical

changes in the look of the world towards women.

They were able to support their families and even

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their wounded husbands or fathers. They offered

great model of an equal partner in life.

Method

In order to achieve this objective, the

feminist approach will be adopted to highlight

the rights of women in their quest of identity

and emancipation within the selected works of the

study. Feminist theory, which originated from

feminist movements, aims at grasping the nature

of gender disparity by discussing women's social

roles and lived experience within the community

they live; “it has developed theories in a

variety of disciplines in order to respond to

issues such as the social construction of sex and

gender.”(Chodorow 2) Some of the earlier forms

of feminism have been criticized for taking into

account only white, middle-class, educated

perspectives, ignoring the rights of poor, black

or illiterate women. This led to the creation of

ethnically specific or multiculturalist forms of

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feminism which were addressed later in the

writings of Tony Morrison, Maya Angelo and Alice

Walker who wrote about the sufferings of black

women in the white society .

Feminist activists advocate women's

rights “such as in contract law, property, and

voting while also promoting bodily integrity,

autonomy, and reproductive rights for

women.”(Gillan 30). Feminist movements have

changed communities and their way of thinking,

particularly in the West, by achieving women's

right to vote, gender impartiality in English,

equal pay for equal job as men, multiplicative

privileges for women, and the right to go into

business agreements and own possessions and many

other issues. Feminists always do their best to

protect women and girls from aggression against

them, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and

sexual assault. They have also advocated for

workplace rights, including maternity and nursing

leave, addressing all women problems including

forms of discrimination against them and

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suppressing their freedom. “Feminism is mainly

focused on women's issues, but because feminism

seeks gender equality, the author bell hooks and

other feminists have argued “that men's

liberation is a necessary part of feminism and

that men are also harmed by sexism and gender

roles.”(32)

The feminist movement affected writers

and authors worldwide and as a result of that

tremendous effect, there appeared fiction and

non-fiction writings, and created new interest in

women's writing. It is not necessarily for the

author who adopts women issues to be female, in

Egypt for example the first person who called for

women emancipation was a man called Kasim Amen

(1863-1908). It also “prompted a general

reevaluation of women's historical and academic

contributions in response to the belief that

women's lives and contributions have been

underrepresented as areas of scholarly

interest”(Blain 91) Much of the early era of

feminist literary scholarship was given over to

the reawakening and recovery of texts written by

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women. Studies like “Dale Spender's Mothers of

the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the

Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their

insistence that women have always been writing.”

(Blain 91) Because of the growth of interest in

women’s issues, a lot of publishers began to re-

issue the novels of the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. Virago Press did the same

thing and became one of “the first commercial

presses to join in the project of reclamation. In

the 1980s Pandora Press, responsible for

publishing Spender's study, issued a companion

line of 18th-century novels written by women”

(Gilbert 1). Nowadays many other publishers care

about republishing the early writings about women

issues such as Broadview and the University of

Kentucky. “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

(1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the

earliest works of feminist philosophy. A Room of

One's Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf, is noted in

its argument for both a literal and figural space

for women writers within a literary tradition

dominated by patriarchy.”(Gilbert 2)

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Ahdaf Souif’s Aisha 1983

Aisha is a collection of short stories

written to shed light on the different lives of

women from various backgrounds. It was written by

the Egyptian author Ahdaf Souif. It was published

in 1983 and got good criticism. The stories are

showing Egyptian women from different classes and

religious backgrounds including Muslim and

Christian heroines. In Egypt there are huge

differences between the upper and lower classes.

There is a huge gap between classes even in the

way of thinking. The upper-class lives in comfort

and luxury, while the lower classes are

struggling and fighting for survive. Even though

the women in “Aisha” have lived very different

lives, they have a lot in common. They are all

trying their best to be independent and resist

the oppression from their male relatives. They

are all in quest for their emancipation. Somehow,

they are all related to the main character,

Aisha. She comes from the upper-class and grew up

in Cairo and London. Her parents are prominent

Egyptian scientists. Aisha is the most

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westernized character in the book, yet she

suffered a lot in her relationship with her

husband. After her fights with her husband she

locks herself up in the bathroom and keeps crying

until she faints. All the bathrooms she got into

in London or Cairo witness how she suffered in

her life. She has none to complain except her

bathroom. During her life in London as a

teenager, she lived in isolation from her white

colleagues who were very happy with their

boyfriends, she also looked at black girls who

lived in minorities and she seemed too different

from them.

There are many female characters in the

stories, but their dilemma is one. They all have

that suppressed shout deep inside their hearts.

Going on reading the stories, we see how cruelly

they treat Zaina, the bride on her wedding night

only because she was a bit afraid because it is

the first time for her to have a relation with a

man:

“Suddenly the four women surrounded me

and pulled me to the floor…I was yelling

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and screaming but I kept my thighs tight

together. My uncle hammered on the door:

“What the Hell’s going on in there?

Curse you all. Shall I come in and shoot

the bitch?” (Souif 91).

It is obvious too to notice how women are

sometimes used as tools of torture against their

likes. Instead of offering help to her in that

serious and critical situation, we find the

female relatives too are participating in making

her suffer and suppressing her shout more and

more:

“ It is all right, my brother, have

patience,” cried my aunt and bent down

suddenly and bit my upper thigh so hard

I jerked it away and they immediately

pulled my legs apart and held them and

he stepped forward and squatted between

them. I managed to wrench a leg away as

he leaned forward I gave him a mighty

kick that sent him sprawling on his

backside…” (Souif 91).

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On her wedding night which is supposed to be the

happiest night in her life, and instead of living

moments of romance with her husband, it turns to

be like an arena for fighting and kicking. Ahdaf

Souif presents some of the hardest scenes ever,

although these events used to happen a long time

age, yet they still have a deep impact and scar

on every lady that had to live that moments of

horror, terror, and panic:

“Then he jumped up and came at me and

slapped my face, then using all his

man’s strength he forced my thighs open,

threaded one of my arms behind each knee

and drew them to my head…. (Souif 91).

When she was 25 years old, her husband Sobhy took

a young girl, Tahiya, as a second wife. Zaina

was very jealous, but there was nothing she could

do to stop the marriage. She kept talking to

herself:

“How can I drive him further away than

he’s already gone? To marry on top of

me? Why? Am I old? Or has my hair gone

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white? Or am I ugly? Or have my teeth

fallen out? Or don’t I please him

anymore? Or am I not a good housewife?

Haven’t I borne him a son and a

daughter, May God have mercy on her?

What is wrong with me that he should

marry on top of me?”(Souif 98).

Instead of blaming her husband, Zaina

started to hate the new wife. Together with her

sister and mother, she made a plan to get rid of

her opponent, by accusing Tahiya for being

treacherous. While their husband was away, Tahiya

walked into Zaina’s bedroom at night, as she was

afraid of the stormy weather outside. Zaina

started to seduce the younger wife, bit her and

made bruises and marks on Tahiya’s thighs. Sobhy

discovered these marks, and he was fully

convinced that Tahiya had slept with another man.

He divorced her and threw her out of the house.

Zaina’s plan was a great success.

“You bitch. You whore. You got (the

mark) it from your lover. Who is he?

Tell me so that I can find him and drink

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his blood. I swear if you weren’t Shiekh

Mahgoub’s daughter, I’d murder you this

instant. Get your clothes together and

get off to your mother’s, you bitch. You

are divorced. I don’t want to see your

face again. I have a mind to drag you

out into the street and make a spectacle

of you, you dirty slut-“(Souif 112).

This story is the severest. Even though

Zaina was the noticeable victim, as she is the

main character in this story, we feel more

sympathy for Tahiya for many reasons. Unlike

Zaina, Tahiya had no family and nowhere to go.

She was married to a man more than 15 years older

than herself, and forced to live with Zaina, who

strongly disliked her. In addition to all this,

Tahiya was really naive. Zaina is oppressed by

her husband, and handled this by oppressing

Tahiya. This is, unfortunately, a very common way

to react. When being treated badly by those in

power, you usually act the same way towards

persons in those you are in power of. Soeif

managed to describe this nicely. I recommend

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“Aisha” as it is a true eye-opener for women

situation in Middle East. Tahiya had a shout

inside her heart and unable to drive it out. She

had nothing to do to prove her innocence except

silence. She suffered greatly not only from her

man but she also tasted injustice by his wife.

In London Review of Literature, Edward

Said writes about a new kind of literature in the

Arab World describing Ahdaf Souif’ works he says:

In this small-scale and intimate first

collection of stories by Ahdaf Souif

there is a remarkably productive,

somewhat depressing tension between the

anecdotal surface of modern, Westernized

Egyptian life and the troubling, often

violent but always persisting

traditional forms beneath.” (8)

Said emphasizes that Souif not only sheds light

on crimes of violence against the woman, but she

also directs her readers attention towards all

types of oppression and aggression against woman

whether it is physical or psychological. She

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keeps fighting all forms of violence including

suppressing a wounded woman’s shout:

“In one story, cajoled and pleaded to by

her family and importunate suitors,

Mariana is nevertheless seduced by an

engineer whose Eau Sauvage, silk robe

and Zamalek flat are to her the height

of an irresistible worldliness: after

she becomes his mistress it is

discovered, however, that he runs a vice

ring. Her brief revolt against the code

governing nubile women is thereafter

quelled, and she marries an

uninteresting bourgeois who perfectly

suits her family’s idea of what a good

husband should be.” (8)

Contrasted with this, Zaina’s marriage

(Zaina is a lower-class foil for Aisha and

Mariana, both Egyptian women living in the world

of half-European attitudes, foreign travel and

university learning) is consummated in ritual

fashion with the bridegroom’s bandaged finger

brutally deflowering her in full view of her

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family, whose ‘honour’ has thus been served.

Ironically, Zaina later confesses that she likes

her ‘big’ husband, and contrives a clever way of

ridding herself of his new, second wife. Mariana,

on the other hand, settles despondently into a

life of correct but dull domesticity.

“Afterwards Setti explained that he was

my husband and any time he wanted to do

anything with me I must let him and not

fight him. But I did,”Zaina said,

laughing.

“I fought with him every time for a

month, but in the end he mastered me.”

“Did you hate him, Dada?’ the child

asked gently.

Zaina laughed again, easily. “No, of

course not. He was a strong man, bless

him. And besides he was as big as a

bull.”(Souif 92)

Edward Said goes on analyzing the

stories to reveal the secrets and the sufferings

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of the girls in their different lives, talking

about Aisha saying she is the daughter of:

“Academics on sabbatical in England,

child of post-revolutionary Egypt,

product of a partly Islamic and native

upbringing, Aisha is the central

consciousness of these eight stories.

They form a cycle of experiences, from

childhood to marital estrangement, to

death; the lives of friends, relatives,

lovers, family retainers intersect with

hers, and when she dies she is

transmuted by Souif into an object of

reflection and reminiscence for a self-

conscious narrator. This last gesture

isn’t very convincing; as if the author

had decided that she couldn’t leave

Aisha to descriptive realism but at the

last minute had to point out the

presence of a significant narrative

process.”(Said 8)

Fortunately, this bit of clumsiness does

not matter too much. Everywhere else the writing

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is skilful and patient, the understanding of this

trickiest of narrative forms is sure and rarely

off-target. Souif is perhaps uncritically

attached to the idea of making each story build

to a final, usually clever ‘point’, but this

habit is offset by a fascinatingly intense range

of material. Sexual experience is central much of

it riskily eccentric and close attention is

lavished on families, nattering companions,

isolated fear and dread. The stories’ “coherence

derives from the Egyptian subject-matter, which

is neither eroticized nor submitted to

explanatory or ideological explanations. Hence

it’s considerable effect, and the significance of

its deliberately ascetic framework.”(8)

Aisha knows that nobody is going to

hear her shouts, so she prefers to escape into

reading day and night and makes up stories in

which protagonists can say no, can shout, have

the ability to fight for their emancipation and

are able to refuse the oppression imposed upon

them.

Monika Aly’s Brick Lane (2004)

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In London Review of Books, Sukhdev

Sandhu writes about Monica Aly who is considered

one of the best and the first feminists who are

able to express women’s sufferings:

“Monica Aly isn’t the first person to

write about the Bangladeshi communities

who live in Brick Lane. Syed Manzurul

Islam’s The Mapmakers of Spitalfields (1997)

was an antsy collection of short

stories, full of wit and fantasy, about

Brothero-Man, one of the pioneering

ship-jumpers and now an ‘invisible

surveyor of the city’. Twenty years

earlier Farrukh Dhondy, later to become

commissioning editor of ethnic

programmes for Channel 4, wrote a series

of sardonic books – East End at Your Feet

(1976) and Come to Mecca (1978) – aimed at

young adults.” (Sandhu 11)

Sandhu emphasizes on the powerful Aly has in

showing the life and suffeings of a Banghaldeshi

woman who lives in Brick Lane, but she even

analyses all her movements and gestures, how she

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leads a new life in a new society which doesn’t

offer her much of her rights:

“Brick Lane is the first novel to focus

almost exclusively on the lives of

Bangladeshi women in Tower Hamlets. It

tries to take us beyond the yellowing

net curtains of their cramped tower-

block flats, and into their living-rooms

and bedrooms. It aims, for the most part

successfully, to articulate their fears

and desires, and offers a rich and

finely textured corrective to those

accounts which portray them as elective

mutes, unthinking purveyors of Third

World tradition.”(Sandhu 12)

The story starts in 1967 in the

Mymensingh district of East Pakistan, which four

years later would become Bangladesh, it tells the

sad trade story of Naznin, a poorly educated

young girl who knows that nobody cares to hear

her shouts or listen to her complaints, so she

decides to complain only to God: “I have no

complaints or regrets to tell you, I tell

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everything to God” (Aly 5). Naznin is married off

to Shanu, an overweight windbag twenty years

older than her:

The man she would marry was old. At

least forty years old. He had a face

like a frog. They would marry and he

would take her back to England with

him…. Men, doing whatever they could in

this world.”(6)

She accompanies back to the East End, where

he has been living for some time. The changeover

from the slow rhythms of village life to the

accelerated London of 1985 seems to be too

difficult. “She opened her eyes and saw Shanu’s

puffy face on the pillow next to her, his lips

parted indignantly even as he slept.”(7) Shanu’s

dreams are more than he can achieve. Husband and

wife struggle to provide for their two daughters

and their only son dies in infancy. Naznin stays

at home during the day, feeling bored with her

life, has few friends other than Razya, who goes

around wearing a Union Jack sweatshirt, and is

locked into a dull existence:

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“Life made its pattern around and

beneath and through her. Naznin cleaned

and cooked and washed. She made

breakfast for Shanu and looked on as he

ate, collected his pens and put them in

his briefcase, watched him from the

window as he stepped like a bandleader

across the courtyard to the bus stop on

the far side of the estate. Then she ate

standing up at the sink and washed the

dishes. She made the bed and tidied the

flat, washed socks and pants in the sink

and larger items in the bath. In the

afternoons she cooked and ate as she

cooked, so that Shanu began to wonder

why she hardly touched her dinner and

she shrugged in a way that food was of

no concern to her. And the days were

tolerable, and the evenings were nothing

to complain about.”(27)

It wasn’t until, in 2001, she falls in love with

a sweatshop-owner’s nephew, Kareem. They start

their love affair which in fact opposes their

24

values and principles. Kareem promises to marry

her after she gets her divorce from her husband,

she goes on describing a feeling she never had

with her husband:

“Looking became unbearable and, as if by

mutual agreement, both lowered their

eyes. Naznin breathed air that was

choked with things unsaid, their

suspense caught in molecules like drops

of consideration. She was aware of her

body, as though just now she had come to

inhabit it for the first time and it was

both strange and wonderful to have this

new physical expression. A pulse behind

her ear. A needle of excitement down her

thigh. Inside her stomach, a deep and

desperate hunger… She didn’t know who

moved first or how but they were in the

bedroom and locked together so close

that even air could not come between

them. She bit his ear. She bit his lip

and tasted blood. He pushed her onto the

bed and tore at her blouse and pushed

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the skirt of her sari around her waist.

Still dressed, she was more than naked…

She helped him undress.” (284)

For the first time, she tastes love and feels its

sweetness. She was always deprived of her

simplest rights and now finally she got the

chance to make up for herself that’s why she is

so fierce in behaving with her new lover:

“She felt it now: there was nothing she

wouldn’t do. She drew him in, not with

passion but with ferocity as if it were

possible to lose and win all in this one

act. He held a hand across her throat

and she wanted everything: to vanish

inside the heat like a drop of dew, to

feel his hand press down and extinguish

her, to hear Shanu come in and see what

she was, his wife.”(284)

At the beginning of the story Naznin’s

mother tells relatives: ‘My child must not waste

any energy fighting against Fate. That way, she

will be stronger.’(2) After a few years in

26

London, Naznin still can’t find the words for

‘this shapeless, nameless thing that crawled

across her shoulders and nested in her hair and

poisoned her lungs, that made her both restless

and listless’ (255). It’s only after she meets

Kareem that she hears a new vocabulary, some of

which she relates to her own problems – ‘Radical

was a new word for Naznin’ – and by the end of

the book she’s bopping up and down to Lulu’s

‘Shout’. (295)

Naznin’s journey is mirrored by that of

her sister Hasinaa back in Bangladesh. She’s

pretty and feisty, rather than plain and passive,

and she elopes at an early age with the nephew of

a sawmill owner. But the following years bring

misfortune more serious than any in London. She

runs away from a violent husband who tortures

her, is raped, works in a factory, turns to

prostitution and becomes a servant. These

vicissitudes, along with those of her friend

Monjue (disfigured after having acid thrown on

her face), are recounted to her sister in long –

excessively long – letters written in Pidgin

27

English. It’s an odd decision, given that Naznin

speaks Bengali at home and that, on the page, the

tragic correspondence looks banal and comic. It

also aspires to an opportunity, “both in

chronology and in cartography that the book

doesn’t manage. The letters do, however, go a

long way to dismiss the idea that Bangladesh is

still rural, pastoral; it is urban, violent and

locked into the global capitalist system.”

(Sandhu 13)

Hasinaa’s letters also sheds light on what

is perhaps the chief weakness of Brick Lane: its

language:

“It opts for pauciloquence. We see the

world through Naznin’s eyes, and hear it

as if from her lips. But she seems to

define herself against the talkativeness

of her husband, who has a BA in English

literature and who loves the sound of

his own orotund voice; her observations

seem disingenuous (‘He says that racism

is built into the “system”. I don’t know

what “system” he means exactly’); her

28

manner is flatly compendious (she reels

off at length the contents of Razya’s

flat, lists the ingredients of the

picnic she takes to St James’s Park) or

pointlessly accretive (‘A young man,

tall as a stilt-walker and with the same

stiff-legged gait, came and sat on the

opposite bench. He put his motorcycle

helmet on the ground. He ate a sandwich

in four large bites. Something in his

jacket crackled like a radio’). (Sandhu

13)

Naznin tries to keep up with the speed of

life in Brick Lane. Aly goes on describing life

there in detail. Whitechapel jumps its residents;

it forces newcomers to assimilate extremely fast.

‘Absence of decoration’, a phrase Aly uses to

describe some of the restaurants along Brick

Lane, makes her neighborhood seem tamer than it

is, and drags her to the edge of melodrama when

she wants to register suffering: Naznin is

‘trapped inside this body, inside this room,

inside this flat, inside this concrete slab of

29

entombed humanity’; with Kareem ‘her life had

become bloated with meaning and each small

movement electrified.’(13)

Now and then she occasionally meet some

Bangaleshi children and other people who remind

her of her rural life: she sees a couple of

schoolchildren who look ‘as pale as rice and loud

as peacocks’; a fridge hums ‘like a giant

mosquito’; wearing a Parka coat, Shanu resembles

‘a Kachuga turtle’. We are told that Naznin

doesn’t remember most of the details of her

birthplace, yet the striking imagery racks up

with increasing excess: she talks to the machines

keeping her son alive in hospital “like a mahout

calms an angry elephant’; a surprised Shanu

‘looked ambushed, raided by dacoits’; making love

to Kareem, ‘like a Sufi in a trance, a whirling

dervish, she lost the thread of one existence and

found another.” (Sandhu 13)

The male characters in Brick Lane are very violent

even in their thoughts, they pour out all kinds

of oppression against women only to satisfy their

manhood. They are also very complicated and have

30

a lot of contradictions; “they’re simply more

fully fleshed out, blessed with contradictions,

sketched with tenderness and humor rather than

pathos.” (Sandhu 13)

Shanu is the most complicated character,

he doesn’t know what he really wants from his

life. He lives in a very simple place. The walls

of his house are decorated with some certificates

of honor, yet his daughters laugh at him, even

his wife gets tired of her life with him

especially after leaving his job as a clerk and

becoming a cab driver. He wants to feel he is

still in charge and control all the people living

in his house. He wants to feel he has authority

over his daughter and when he wants to punish

her, he hands a banana skin: “He flogged

enthusiastically but without talent. His energy

went into the niyyah – the making of his intention

– and here he was advanced and skilful, but the

delivery let him down.”(Aly 355)

Shanu rarely behaves like a real

man, so one day he decides to go on a tour with

his family to show them the real London. He buys

31

his wife and daughters new clothes and other

things to enjoy their time. Naznin, on the other

hand was really has mixed feelings at that time.

She doesn’t know whether to feel excited for

being out with her family, or to feel frightened

because of having a secret lover. Shanu asks one

of the tourists to take a photo for him with his

family. Naznin says it is the first and the last

photo they take together, and after the photo had

been developed, there was nothing except the

feet.

The character of Kareem is somewhat

less convincing, and to damaging effect. “He is,

before the careful symmetries of the novel are

finally unfurled, the anti-Shanu: young, not

greying and corpulent; religious rather than

waftingly multi-faithed; someone who prefers to

do things rather than read about them;

financially secure, not doling out half his

meagre salary in loan repayments.” (Sandhu 13)

For Naznin, he offers her a bright future after

getting her divorce. He was able to change her

point of view in the world. She used to think

32

that she was only born to suffer not to love or

be loved. She forgets her values and prefers to

live in the mirage he offers her rather than

living in a real hell with the frog- face

husband.

Kareem is supposed to embody the

discord and dissonance of second-generation

Bangladeshi youths. They have passed through

violence and suffered a lot during their first

years in London. They were the ones, along with

their brothers and uncles, who had the first

impact of the assault from the 1970s to the

1990s; they really suffered through their

education as a result of being bullied by their

colleagues and violent teachers. By turn these

men when they get power over some people even if

they are their wives or daughters, they act

violently against them.

Strangely, this novel, part of it set in

1985, has so little to say about the campaign of

violence and intimidation which marked the lives

of almost every Bangladeshi, young and old, male

or female, who lived in and around Brick Lane

33

before the current era of reformation. Even the

dream of Naznin’s daughters of having a better

chance of education, to find a suitable lover, is

more than a generational strife, or a struggle

between tradition and modernity: “it represents a

passionate attempt to become less quiescent, less

liable to be treated as a social punch bag.

‘Never again’ is the tacit credo by which today’s

Bangladeshis live.” (Sandhu 13)

Surprisingly, Naznin never thought

going back to her country especially after having

the sewing job and being into a relation with

Kareem who promised to marry her after getting

divorced from her frog-face husband. She decided

to stay there in her new society although her

husband went back home, hoping to have a new

start there, living on the hope that his family

would join him someday.

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Reading Lolita in Tehran is divided into

four sections: "Lolita," "Gatsby," "James," and

"Austen." The first shows us the reading group

34

including the professor and her students;

"Gatsby" and "James" shed light on Nafisi's years

teaching at universities in Iran, through the

revolution and the war against Iraq. These two

middle sections contain violent and cruel trials

against professors; air raids; the regular fights

in class between Marxist and reactionary Muslim

students; the death in prison of a particularly

talented student, who as a child stole books from

the houses where her mother worked as a servant;

a young soldier who went to war and then returned

to a university where he'd never belonged and

finally committed suicide by setting himself on

fire. In the last section, "Austen," we finally

learn about the personal lives and the different

experiences of the girls. The "fairy-tale

atmosphere" of these Thursday mornings spent

talking about books allowed the eight women to

share so much of their secret life with one

another. She goes on emphasizing how women and

girls have to live in oppression for whatever the

reasons are:

35

“The pressure was hardest on the

students. I felt helpless as I listened

to their endless tales of woe. Female

students were being penalized for

running up the stairs when they were

late for classes, for laughing in the

hallways, for talking to members of the

opposite sex. One day Sanaz had barged

into class near the end of the session,

crying. In between bursts of tears, she

explained that she was late because the

female guards at the door, finding a

blush in her bag, had tried to send her

home with a reprimand.”(Nafisi 9)

Sometimes girls have to lie because if the tell

the truth, they won’t get what they want,

especially when girls want to attend the

literature class with their professor:

“How did you convince him to let you

come? I asked. I lied, she said. You

lied? What else can one do with a person

who is so dictatorial he won’t let his

daughter, at this age, go to an all-

36

female literature class? Besides, isn’t

this how we treat the regime? Can we

tell the Revolutionary Guards the truth?

We lie to them, we hide our satellite

dishes. We tell them we don’t have

illegal books and alcohol in our houses.

Even my venerable father lies to them

when the safety of his family is at

stake, Nassrin added defiantly.”(17)

The professor together with her students decided

to have a regular literary meeting as a kind of

escape from the prison in which they live, they

lived in isolation from the outer world. They

just needed to breathe freedom even once a week:

“Our class was shaped within this

context, in an attempt to escape the

gaze of the blind censor for a few hours

each week. There, in that living room,

we rediscovered that we were also

living, breathing human beings, and no

matter how repressive the state became,

no matter how intimidated and frightened

we were, like Lolita we tried to escape

37

and to create our own little pockets of

freedom. And like Lolit, we took every

opportunity to flaunt our

insubordination: by showing a little

hair from under our scarves, insinuating

a little color into the drab uniformity

of our appearances, growing our nails,

falling in love and listening to

forbidden music.”(26)

The wildest one, the divorcee with red

nails, is beaten by her third husband, who calls

her "used" because she has been married before.

She cannot easily leave him, because the courts

routinely grant child custody to husbands, and

she has a young daughter. Two of the girls are

happily enough married. One of them got to know

her husband in a university class of Nafisi's.

"Did you fall in love?" the teacher asks, as she

seems relentlessly to ask everyone. "Well, yes,

of course," the girl says, in an answer as

revealing as a line of dialogue written by

Austen. Sanaz, an eye-catching young woman from a

good family, is rejected by the boy to whom she

38

has been engaged since childhood, apparently

because after living in England for five years,

he no longer wants the sheltered Muslim girl his

parents have nominated because she no longer

copes up with his aspirations. And when Sanaz

goes on vacation with five girlfriends, the

Revolutionary Guard arrests and jails the six of

them for "Western attitudes," and the girls are

subjected to two virginity tests the second

because the first, conducted by a woman, is

considered suspect.

“Sanaz and five of her girlfriends had

gone for a two-day vacation by the

Caspian sea. On their first day, they

had decided to visit her friend’s fiancé

in an adjoining villa. Sanaz kept

emphasizing that they were all properly

dressed, with their scarves and long

robes…. There were no alcoholic

beverages in the house, no undesirable

tapes or CDs. She seemed to be

suggesting that if there had been, they

might have deserved the treatment they

39

received at the hands of the

revolutionary guards… They took all of

them to a special jail for infractions

in matters of morality. There, despite

their protests, the girls were kept in a

small, dark room, which they shared the

first night with several prostitutes and

a drug addict…. They were held in that

room for forty-eight hours. Despite

their repeated requests, they were

denied the right to call their parents.

Apart from brief excursions to the rest

room at appointed times, they left room

twice-the first time to be led to

hospital, where they were given

virginity tests by a woman gynecologist,

who had her students observe the

examinations. Not satisfied with her

verdict, the guards took them to a

private clinic for a second

check.”(Nafisi 72-3)

Another of the book-group members is being

presented with a series of suitors for an

40

arranged marriage; at the same time she is

considering immigrating to the United States to

continue her studies and as a way of her

emancipation. To go or not to go is the question

that seems to hover in the air for all these

women to escape from their destined submission

except one, who is a sincere Muslim and has

decided to stay in Iran, not to marry, and to

pursue a career in publishing. The professor was

the first to leave looking for a place where she

could shout and be heard and responded:

“I left Tehran on June 24, 1997. I write

and teach once again… I still teach

Nabokow, James, Fitzgerald, Conrad as

well as Iraj Pezeshkzad, who is

responsible for one of my favorite

Iranian novels… I left Iran, but Iran

didn’t leave me. Much has changed in

appearance since Bijan and I left.”(342)

Although she left, she still thinks of what has

happened in Iran. She keeps pursuing any news of

emancipation or reedom for women back there in

Tehran

41

“There is more defiance in Manna’s gait

and those of other women, their scarves

are more colorful and their robes much

shorter, they wear makeup now and walk

freely with men who aren’t their

brothers, fathers or husbands. Parallel

to this, the raids and arrests and

public executions also persist. But

there is a stronger demand for freedom”

(342)

Although she is now far away from her students,

she keeps in touch with them. She finds out that

most of them followed up her footsteps and

decided to escape from the prison where they used

to live in quest for their emancipation. They are

finally able to shout and breathe the air of

freedom:

“Marta left for Canada a few months

after we moved to the US. She used to

write me e-mails or call me regularly,

but I have not heard from her for a long

time. Yassi tells me that she enrolled

in college and now has a son. I heard

42

from Sanaz, too, when I first came to

the States. She called me from Europe to

inform me that she was now married and

intended to enroll at the university.

But Azin tells me she dropped that plan

and is keeping house, as the saying

goes. When I first came to America, I

didn’t hear from Azin often, she usually

called me on my birthday.”(343)

She left, but before that she had planted the

seeds of freedom in the hearts of her students.

She taught them that emancipation is more

valuable than life itself, and if the bird is

caged, it must escape one day and shout with

freedom or die in silence:

“A former student had told me that Azin

was teaching at Allameh, the same

courses and books that I once taught.

The last she had heard of Azin, she

added mischievously, she was moving into

the room next to my old office on the

fifth floor. I often thought of her and

her beautiful little Negar.” (Nafisi 343)

43

Even the last girl who decided to live and stay

in Iran despite the oppression and aggression she

faces every single day, suddenly she had to leave

her homeland too after her husband divorced her

and forced her to leave her pretty daughter. She

suddenly found herself alone and broken. She had

no other solutions than travelling and escaping

from the cage in which she had to live in

bondage.

“A few months ago, she called out of

the blue, from California. Her voice was

filled with that buoyant and flirtatious

tone whose notes I seem to have

memorized. She has remarried, her new

husband lives in California. Her former

husband had taken Negar from her and

there was not much else to stay in

Tehran for. She was full of ideas about

enrolling in classes and starting a new

life.”(Nafisi 343)

Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006)

44

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf tells

the story of a female Muslim who had to leave

her country Syria and live in the United

States. This story is an autobiography just

like Nafisi’s novel Reading Lolita in Tehran in

which the writers talk about personal

experiences and lives in their home countries

and in the new societies. Tarek Al Ariss says:

“Through the eyes of an earnest and

strong-willed girl named Khadra, Kahf

provides us with a kaleidoscopic view of

growing up Muslim and female in America.

Racial and religious prejudice,

political developments in the US and in

the Middle East, integration and

activism, all these issues come together

in a carefully constructed crucible,

strategically situated in America’s

heartland.”(444)

In her novel Kahf sheds light on an ideal Muslim

family that try hard to keep their values and

principles as pure and clean as they were since

they travelled to the new world. They do their

45

best to be a good model for all the people in the

area in which they live, she also focuses on the

way other races and religions adopt in treating

their women:

“Modelled on that of early converts

such as Khadija and Abu-Bakr, Khadra’s

community is made up of Muslim pioneers

in the Midwest, missionaries who set up

shop in Indianapolis in the 1970s.

Holding on to a “pure” Islam, which they

reinvented along the way, they sought to

shield it and themselves from

corruption, jadedness, and the

political. In shedding light on this

life of simple devotion, Kahf examines

the community’s views on the

Americanized Muslims or “McMuslims”

(186), on Christians and Jews, and on

the treatment of women and of African-

American Muslims especially who traveled

to the US.” (444)

46

Kahf explores the cultural clashes of Muslim

life in America, including racism between Muslims

and bigotry by non-Muslim Americans who look at

Muslims as Aliens or different creatures. Kahf

conveys her sufferings through Khadra in her

biography. She sheds light on how society looks

at the Muslim female. How she was able to survive

as an outcast in a place in which she has to

live, communicate and interact. In fact Kahf’s

novel tells the story of every immigrant Arab or

Muslim female. She uses Khadra to convey her

shout to the outer world and tries to teach every

lady to make her shout be heard in any society in

which they have to live or stay.

In order not to feel as if they lived in

isolation from the environment in which they

live. Khadra’s family decided to wander about the

streets and districts to develop Islamic

awareness:

“Khadra’s father and the other center

workers took the Dawah on the road. They

drove to chapters across the country,

47

developing Islamic awareness. Ebtehaj

was just involved in organizing local

Muslim women’s groups, although she was

not a salaried center employee like

Wajdy. So the whole family piled into

the station wagon for these mission

trips” (Kahf 99)

As Khadra grows older, her tranquil world and

its values come gradually under inspection. The

turning point in her life happens, when she

accompanies her family to Mecca for pilgrimage.

On this trip, the American Islam of the Dawah

Center comes in contact with “real” Islam, the

Islam of Hajj, and of Saudi Arabia more

specifically. The integration of the religion,

experienced and sustained by the immigrant in the

Diaspora, is violently exposed in this context.

She was arrested by the Saudi vice police on her

way to the Mosque for Fajr prayer (prohibited to

women in Saudi Arabia). She was really shocked

when she was harassed by her cousin’s Saudi

friends, Khadra becomes aware of the weakness of

her idyllic world. “And even though she was in

48

[…] the Muslim country where Islam started, she

had never felt so far from home. There was a nip

in the air all of a sudden.”(Al Ariss 444)

Khadra felt confused of what she passed through

her experience in Saudi Rabia. She remembers her

talking with her aunt about the true meaning of

Islam. How a person can be a true Muslim and

when:

“What is a real Muslim, Khadra?” Aunt

Khadija said finally.

“When you do the five pillars,” Khadra

shrugged, “you know, and follow the

Quran and the prophet and wear hijab and

follow the Islamic way of life and”

Aunt Khadija said gently, “Shahada.

That’s all. Belief that God is one. When

that enters your heart and you surrender

to it, you are a Muslim.

Khadra felt alarm. It wasn’t that

simple. Her parents said so. You have to

practice Islam to be a real

Muslim.”(Kahf 24)

49

As she becomes aware that the idealized Islam

of the Dawah people is in fact away from its

wider practice, she produces and grows attached

to her own Islam. Khadra finds the necessary

balance that allows her to hold on to Islam as

home while acknowledging the limitations and the

contradictions at the heart of its many

practices. Similar to the Indiana landscape it

summons up so well, Kahf’s narrative stages

Khadra’s desertion of the Platonic cave as she

sets out on her journey to discover reality.

However, aside “from a few meaningful encounters

along the way, this long journey consists mostly

of a list of tales and mundane events. Clearly,

such are the trappings of the autobiographical

genre that sets out in this case to tell both a

personal and a communal story”. (Al Ariss 444)

Though it is important and necessary to shed

light on an experience often hidden by current

representations of Islam and the West or Islam in

the West, it is also important to keep in mind

the medium – the novel – and the rules of

seduction, for lack of better terms, that ought

to structure it. Unluckily, the sincerity of

50

Khadra rubs on the text, undermining its ability

to rise through literature beyond the cultural

moment it purports to capture. Marriage is also a

big issue in this novel. When Khadra first

married, she seems she didn’t give that marriage

the due care of thought. Khadra and the man she

married really never knew the true meaning of

marriage because they were young and, apparently

foolish, they shouldn’t have got married at the

early age.

“ Juma asked to go home with Eyad and

Khadra one day. From where Khadra

sat, she had a view of the back of

Juma’s head, his lush black hair, and

his deep bronze complexion. Juma’s lips

as he turned to talk to Eyad were large

and exquisitely chiseled, the lower lip

wide and curved like a Kuwaiti dhow. The

scent of sandalwood subtly invaded her

senses.

51

When it became clear during his visit

that he was there to ask her parents

and, by their permission, her, to

consider a proposal of marriage from

him, it was not entirely a surprise,

even though he and Khadra had never

exchanged a word beyond that phone call

without Eyad in the middle.”(Kahf 205)

Although Juma originally was charismatic,

a keen husband, and a good friend, after a short

while Khadra saw his true colors and his hidden

personality. He was very obstinate in his

religious and gender-role tendencies which was

personified by using his husband’s right to

forbid “Khadra from riding her bike because,

eventually, it embarrassed him. It is hard to

imagine how she must have felt when Juma would

leave, sometimes for days on end, when he was

upset.”(Al Ariss 444). It was his illogical way

of doing things which ultimately broke Khadra

down and tore her a part especially when she

tried to ride the bike at that day for example:

52

“Finally, Juma pulled rank. “I forbid

you.” He said, laying his hand on the

bike seat. “As your husband I forbid

you”.Khadra recoiled. She couldn’t believe he

would out and out say that, even if it

was Islamically valid. Her father never

said things like that to her mother. It

was Alien to everything she felt and

knew.But eventually, she put the bike in the

resident storage area of their

building’s basement. Such a little

thing, a bike. In the overall picture of

a marriage, what was a bike? The gears

rusted and the tires lost air. Something

inside her rusted a little, too.”(Kahf

230)

53

It was the first time for Khadra to feel

that suppressed shout inside herself, but she had

nothing to do except for escaping to her silence,

in fact being married to Juma, he began to kill

her ambitions and hopes:

“Juma reached the end of his degree. He

couldn’t extend his visa.“What about me? Khadra said “I’ve got

one year to go.” They were driving to

Indianapolis.“You can finish at the University of

Kuwait,” he said. “It’s nice really”.“You could apply for US citizenship.

You’re married to a citizen. They will

let you stay”.

54

“I don’t need American citizenship. I am

Kuwaiti, not Palestinian.I don’t have a problem getting around

with my passport”.“Or-what-if-we could live apart for a

year. It’d be one year. You could go on

to Kuwait, and I could stay on my own”.Juma laughed. “You’re joking, right?

Leave my wife in America?”(Kahf 243)

There is another example of a not so

perfect marriage: Abu Abdallah with his two

separate wives. The first marriage, with Aunt

Fatma, was based solely on love. She says that

she has given him “pure gold” but he didn’t know

how to handle that treasure and instead got

another marriage. I believe he let her love “slip

between his fingers”(412) because he is such a

generous person and strives to make everyone

55

happy that he got carried away and neglected what

truly mattered to him, but he doesn’t realize

that.

Mohja Kahf’s book Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

explores the life of a Muslim American girl who

faces many obstacles and challenges in her life

such as racism in the Midwest which becomes more

violent especially after the events of the

Iranian hostage crisis which ended with accusing

of all Muslims. Khadra remembers the bad names

her neighbors used to call her such as “raghead”.

These incidents formed her thought and made her

realize that being Muslim would make her

different from others. She is torn apart even

within her Muslim community as she sees

contradictions and differences in religious

beliefs and values. She knows other families who

are not as strict as hers especially in the

matter of wearing hijab. She has different views

with her family concerning her life like divorce

and abortion. Khadra’s biggest challenge is

finding her lost identity in the new world. All

over the novel, Khadra has to face challenges and

56

obstacles and by overcoming them, she helps

herself form her personality as a human being.

Finally, she realizes most of her goals and finds

some answers to her shouts.

Conclusion

No doubt that all the female writers

have passed through some similar challenges in

their lives. All of them shared the dream of a

world free of domination or violence against the

woman. All of them have the belief that the woman

is a partner in the society and not a follower.

All of them share the same principle that women

have the same rights and duties just like men.

They all released their shouts of sufferings,

submission, and pains, and they encouraged women

to stand upright and say “No” for everything that

might humiliate her or make her feel less than

man. The female writers also confirms that it is

not a war between the two sexes. Each partner has

his/her role in society. The world, in order to

last, needs for both men and woman.

57

Works Cited

1-Al Ariss, Tarek. Little Mosque on the Prairie, Caroll

and Graf Publishers, 2006.

2 -Aly, Monica, Brick Lane, Black Swan; New Ed

edition (22 April 2004).

3-Blain, Virginia. The Feminist Companion to Literature in

English from the Middle Ages to the Present. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1990.

4-Chodorow, Nancy. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory.

New Haven: Yale University, 1989.

58

5-Gilbert, Sandra. Paperbacks: From our Mothers’ Libraries:

Women Who Created the Novel: New York Times, 4 May,

1986.

6-Gillan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Women’s Conceptions of

Self and MorAlyty. Harvard Educational Review (47),

1977.

7-Kahf, Mohja. The Girl in Tangerine Scarf, PublicAffairs

(September 12, 2006)

8-Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran, Random House

Trade Paperbacks, 2003.

9-Said, Edward. London Review of Literature, Vol.5 No.12,

July 1983.

59

10-Sandhu, Sukhdev. London Review of Books, Vol.25

No.19, October 2003.

11-Soeif, Ahdaf. Aisha, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC;

New edition (8 Feb 1996).

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