I Killed Scheherazade E-Book

Joumana Haddad

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Joumana Haddad is angry about the way Arab women are portrayed in the West. In I Killed Scheherazade she challenges prevalent notions of identity and womanhood in the Middle East and speaks of her own intellectual development and the liberating impact of literature on her life. Fiery and candid, this is a provocative exploration of what it means to be an Arab woman today. 'A vivid assertion of individuality, free speech, free choice and dignity against religious bigotry, prejudice and the herd instinct both within and outside the Arab world, and within and outside Islam' Guardian 'A spirited call to Arab women to stand up' New York Times 'It takes genius to attain such radical freedom.' Etel Adnan 'In this courageous book Joumana Haddad breaks down the taboo of the silent absent Arab woman.' Elfriede Jelinek 'A very courageous and illuminating book about women in the Arab world. It opens our eyes, destroys our prejudices and is very entertaining.' Mario Vargas Llosa 'Joumana Haddad cannot be intimidated. This book is a lesson of courage for all those who fight to go beyond their own limits and chains.' Roberto Saviano 'Literature is often a storm that breaks the rules of decorum and forces us to come face to face with our weaknesses and illusions. Joumana Haddad is a poet who inhabits the storm.' Tahar Ben Jelloun

Leseprobe

Joumana Haddad

I Killed Scheherazade

Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman

SAQI

EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-86356-444-4

First published by Saqi Books in 2010 This ebook edition published 2011

Copyright © Joumana Haddad 2010 and 2011 Foreword © Etel Adnan 2010 amd 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

SAQI

26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RH, UKwww.saqibooks.com

To my daughter, The one I might/might never have, Awaited, unexpected, Wanted, feared, Dreamed, held in arms, Made of hope, made of flesh, Real, unbelievable, With a thousand names Yet forever unnamed, Born, Unborn, Loved in both her forests.

Contents

Note to the Reader

Foreword by Etel Adnan

To Start With ... On camels, belly dancing, schizophrenia and other pseudo-disasters

I.

An Arab Woman Reading the Marquis de Sade

II.

An Arab Woman Not Belonging Anywhere

III.

An Arab Woman Writing Erotic Poetry

IV.

An Arab Woman Creating a Magazine about the Body

V.

An Arab Woman Redefining Her Womanhood

VI.

An Arab Woman Unafraid of Provoking Allah

VII.

An Arab Woman Living and Saying No

To Start Again ... Am I really an ‘Arab woman’?

Post-Partum: I Killed Scheherazade

The Poet’s Chapter: Attempt at an Autobiography

Acknowledgments

‘The Arab malaise is inextricably bound with the gaze of the Western Other – a gaze that prevents everything, even escape. Suspicious and condescending by turns, the Other’s gaze constantly confronts you with your apparently insurmountable condition. You have to have been the bearer of a passport of a pariah state to know how categorical such a gaze can be. You have to have measured your anxieties against the Other’s certainties about you to understand the paralysis it can inflict.’

Samir KassirBeing Arab

Note to the Reader

The idea of this book started with a foreign journalist asking me, one rainy day in December 2008, how did an ‘Arab woman like you reach the point of publishing a controversial erotic magazine like JASAD in Arabic?’ Were there any particular elements and precursors in my upbringing and background, she inquired, that paved the way for such an ‘uncommon’ and polemic decision?

‘Most of us in the West are not familiar with the possibility of liberated Arab women like you existing,’ she added.

She had meant it as a compliment, of course, but I remember being provoked by her words and rather rude in my reply: ‘I don’t think I am that exceptional. There are many “liberated Arab women” like me. And if you are not aware that we exist, as you claim, then it is your problem not ours.’

Later that evening, I regretted my defensive reaction. Still, the journalist’s question remained stuck in my head, and I tried to understand better why she had asked it, and why it had irritated me to that extent. My attempt to understand soon became a small text; the small text developed into a long piece; the long piece then grew to become an exposé; the exposé combined with other texts I had produced around the same subject on various previous occasions; it all merged with some pertinent and revealing autobiographical notes I had written over the years; and the result was a book: this book.

Was it a good or a bad idea? Is it necessary or irrelevant? Too general? Too personal? Too scattered? Too self-absorbed? It’s rather late for me to ask these, and similar, questions now. The only thing I know is that writing it felt inevitable. Inescapable, even. Much like a love story. And to me at least, that is enough of a justification.

However, having decided to publish it, I hope I’ll find more justifications for it day after day, through the new life you, the readers, are going to give it.

Dear Jenny, please accept my very late apology for my needless rudeness towards you. I hope you can consider this modest testimony as a not-too-awkward attempt to say: ‘I’m sorry.’

And, most importantly: ‘Thank you.’

Foreword

Etel Adnan

The latest news is that Scheherazade is dead, assassinated! Was it an act of passion or of reason? Probably both. Joumana Haddad has just killed the heroine from The Arabian Nights. And never has a crime been so joyous – and moral.

The story of this killing is a stormy wind that clears the sky. Not the sky charged with monotheisms, but the sky that is a woman’s body, the personal body that belongs only to itself.

A historical myth had to be killed so the body, and therefore also the mind, could be liberated, and this experience had to be written so it could be better affirmed.

So, before listening to noise, we must listen to silence. Before sonorous words, there is the first word, the existence of the body, and Haddad proposes, not that we lose ourselves in its glorification, but that we listen to it.

I like this narrative-cum-analysis that resonates like jazz or rap music. And yet it is an indictment of impeccable logic punctuated by anger, by more than anger, by the ecstatic – mystical – search for absolute liberation, which would be possible only through the liberation of this ‘object–subject’ that is this body with which life begins and ends.

But from birth the body is mired in a social context, and it is thus that the constraints begin and lead us even into slavery.

Haddad rejects mild measures. Coming from a country where there has been much killing (and for nothing), she employs equally intense violence, but of a different nature. She strikes out against all taboos and her ‘crime’ becomes a birth, an act of life.

She speaks of the Arab woman, of what is familiar to her, but what she says concerns all women throughout history, especially those of the Mediterranean region, where they are told with sacred authority that they are a sub-product of Creation, God having created Adam whereas Eve merely emerged from his rib. But Haddad brings the good news that woman comes only from herself, and that she must make herself, must create herself – just like man. She must become the new Scheherazade, writing her tales to participate in the creation of the world through literature.

She brings the crucial questions of identity and of taking root back, not to the social me, which is more narcissistic than we think, but to the freedom she discovered as a child, and which is the shifting place of perpetual departure.

All of this is put into question with a wild joy and a surplus of intelligence that carry us along, in a text that in the end is a barbaric poem.

It takes genius to attain such radical freedom.