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Arab Women Arab WarsAuthor(s): Miriam CookeReviewed work(s):Source: Cultural Critique, No. 29 (Winter, 1994-1995), pp. 5-29Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354420 .

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Miriam Cooke

Venturing out into the street for the first time alone, Cherifaadjusts her veil so that the seeing eye should not be seen.Heedless of propriety, she crosses the medina to warn her dis-sident husband that he is in danger of his life. Meanwhile,Touma in a bar in the French quarter tries to look casual inher strange new clothes and the even stranger environment.Family and friends condemn her as a prostitute.Nuzha, the "prostitute," watches incredulously as the youngmen climb the walls to their death. The Israelis are not goingto run out of bullets. Another way must be found to penetrateinto their stronghold. She offers to lead the combatants intothe compound through a secret underground passage that canbe accessed through her kitchen.In a paroxysm of pain, a woman tries to prevent her childfrom being born, while her husband at the front tries to sur-vive mortal wounds. They are both struggling to keep thepromise that he should be the first to see their son. The deadinfant is placed on the dead man's chest.

? 1995 by CulturalCritique.Winter 1994-95. 0882-4371/95/$5.00.

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Three vignettes from three Arab wars: the AlgerianRevolu-tion, the Intifada, the Iraq-IranWar.Glimpsessnatched (bythisreader)fromstories womenwrote while theirpeople wereat war. Assia Djebar (Les Enfants du Nouveau Monde), SaharKhalifa (Babal-Saha), and Aliya Talib (Greening)each recordedin fictionsome of the roles women played in an event gener-allyconsideredto be the preserveof men.

The way we talk about an event affects the way we will experi-ence or perceive our experience of a later analogous event.We all collaborate in this shaping of history. Some events like warare so existentially important for their communities that they de-mand a greater degree of collaboration in the construction of thenarratives than of the counternarratives. Differences of perspec-tive and in sociopolitical roles that are acceptable in normal timesbecome intolerable in war time.In WritingWar,Lynne Hanley deplores the disputes that haveso often arisen between those who have chosen to write about warand their critics. She says thata rigid distinction is drawnbetween the act of producingandthe act of interpretinga literarywork,and a battle ensues overwhich is the more essential enterprise. And because suchbattles for supremacyare premisedon the validityof the cate-gorical distinctionsupon which they are based, the bellicoseliterarymind is alwaysvexed by writing and writers who re-fuse to stayin their proper place. (8)

She urges war writers and their critics to work together withoutstriving to set up hierarchies of value and "truth." Her contribu-tion to this cooperative project is a volume that alternates shortstories and literary essays. Hanley's project is both creative andcritical, and its janus-like ambition has helped me to situate myown work: I do not see myself as simply criticizing or dispassion-ately describing and analyzing what Arab novelists and short storywriters have penned on the wars they have experienced. I con-ceive of my work as part of a broader literary intervention: to ex-plore possible causes, to expose probable effects, and then to imag-ine alternatives.


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The premise of this paper is that attention paid to literaturethat emerges out of the very entrails of war may change the waysin which we experience and express war. During the anger andchaos of war, many write; most will quickly be forgotten, if they areever noted. Yet, many of these women and men who write, eventhose who are paid, do so because they hope, however forlornly,to intervene in the situation and thus make a difference. Such writ-ing is an integral part of the war endeavor, and as such it has newand often surprising things to say. If we wish to approach the dy-namic of war and not just to repeat canned tales of heroism andvictimization, we should listen to these writers' words and makeothers listen. It is this literature, much more than that written outof the comfort and safety of postbellum panelled studies, that canteach us about war, about the ways in which people negotiate vio-lence, and about the construction of counternarratives.These narratives cannot be invented ex post facto. They havemeaning and power primarily when they participate in the actionitself. To locate and recognize these oppositional stories, we musttake seriously the immediately encoded war experience. Yet few un-til recently have accorded such writing any worth. In general, theonly war literature to be taken seriously was that which emergedafter the passion of war had subsided. In Wartime,Paul Fussell reiter-ates a commonplace of literary criticism when he condemns militarymen's recording of life at the World War II front as "gush, waffle,and cliche occasioned by high-mindedness, the impulse to soundportentous, and the slumbering of the critical spirit" (251).However, in the 1990s there are two problems with such anattitude. First, debates about the literary canon have revealed thatblanket statements about literary production enable a kind ofknee-jerk censorship-don't bother to read any European warfiction published between 1939 and 1945 or any Iraqi war novelsand short stories that came out during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. They're all rubbish. With so much fiction published, the judi-cious reader will not open the maligned books. Thus, works im-portant possibly for literary and certainly for political reasons willbecome effectively censured. A second problem is still more cru-cial. It concerns the interface between war and social values thatfiction uniquely elicits. The unthinking rejection of fiction writtenduring war makes it difficult to understand how war today is


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fought other than it was during and at any time before World WarII. War today does not always feel like war. The front that hadconveniently marked a space as other and appropriate for killingand dying has in may cases come home. As we in the West watchour world as we knew it crumble, we recognize that the Cold Warwas cold in the West only. Hot war pervaded and continues toshape the lives of others. Now war as a condition of militarizedalertness has become endemic to our daily lives. We realize that itis as hard to separate armed, organized conflict from unarmed,disorganized violence as it is to distinguish between combat andnoncombat.' Yet, we have few guides to thinking anew about war.Fiction is one such guide. For writing that we had thought to beabout peace time may also relate to war. In fact, it may not be sodifferent and certainly not so easily separable from that which wasonce only written about an event clearly labelled "war."

* * *Since the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, Iraqi critics,such as Abd al-Sattar Nasir, Salah al-Ansari, and Latif Nasir Hu-sayn, have debated whether this war was the first to have producedwhat they have called "war literature" (al-Hamid Hammudi 95).They use the term to specify literature written during war that isnot transparently propaganda. Of course, in the absolute sense ofthe term, this is not true-Homer himself was surely not the firstto turn fighting into writing. But then again, these Iraqi critics maybe at least partially right. It is only in the 20th century (perhaps,

as Gareth Thomas suggests, since the Spanish Civil War), that warliterature has been discussed and self-consciously produced as aconstitutive part of a war effort (Thomas 18-29). However, thisliterature in war, even when not rejected out of hand, remains atbest controversial.When I met the Lebanese male writer Taufiq Awwad in thesummer of 1982, he told me that it was not yet time to write theWarand Peaceof the Lebanese Civil War nor to paint its Guernica.Time was needed, he assured me, to see the contours of this chaosmore clearly. Yet, many women and some men in Lebanon had bythat time written libraries of books and painted galleries of paint-ings, and what they had produced could not be so easily dismissedas mere journalese and photography, in other words, as a form ofunreflective recording that can respond to the unexpected. Awwad


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was nostalgically calling for Wordsworthian reflection or what theIraqi critic Basim Abd al-Hamid Hammudi in 1986 called takhzin(storage). However, Hammudi does not use this word in the sense ofWordsworth and Awwad. He rejects such storage as damaging be-cause it does not permit the authentic war text to be constructed. Inhis enthusiasm to tout the war writer's, and incidentally the critic's,importance, Hammudi goes beyond Hemingway's advocacy of the"true"transcription of the experience of great events2 to assert thatliterary merit derivesfrom the documentary function. In effect, heclaims that glorious events spontaneously unfold into glorious texts.Even if I do not agree completely with Hammudi, I do believethat the novel, poem, short story, or painting that emerges directlyout of the war experience (whether this be at the front or in a war-like situation analogous to civil war or to social anarchy) does havea unique and important story to tell, and not just about Iraqis,but about all present-day communities at war. This is a story thatchallenges the Homeric myth that divides itself between menfighting and women crying. These war texts may also have aunique and important role to play, because they not only reflectbut may sometimes interact with the events and mood of the con-flict. By retaining and perpetuating the dynamism of the experi-ence, they can project a space in which changes can be imagined.This envisioning is possible because the final form has not beenfixed and now, thanks to such texts, might never be. The experi-ence that is immediately encoded retains the play of the conflictingdiscourses of war time. In his poem "WarPoet," the British soldierDonald Bain captures the dynamic between a harrowing experi-ence and its immediate narration:

We n our hastecanonlysee the smallcomponentsof thescene;We cannot tell what incidentswillfocuson the final screen./ Abarrageof disruptivesound, a petal on a sleeping face,/ Bothmust be noted, both must have their place./ It maybe that ourlater selvesor else our unborn sons/ Willsearchformeaninginthe dust of long deserted guns. / Weonly watch,and indicate,and make our scribbledpencilnotes./ Wedo not wish to moral-ize,onlyto ease our dustythroats.(qtd.in Fussell296)

In reply to Bain's wistful conjecture about future semanticists, Fus-sell wrily comments: "But what time seems to have shown our later


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selves is that perhaps there was less coherent meaning in the eventsof wartime than we had hoped" (296). Exactly so. Time should notbe allowed to impose coherent meaning as though it inhered inthe events themselves. Time creates an illusory coherence thatdoes not substitute for or negate the impressionistic notations ofthose who suffered war firsthand.War is experienced in scattered fragments. What is the partic-ipant to make of these small components of the scene that areunited only by the fact of a single experiencing subject? What is tobe made of the barrage of disruptive sound and the petal on thesleeping face? They do not make any sense except if they fit intosome larger sense, some framework, best of all a myth, a war myth.The war myths of many cultures, including those of the Arabworld, designate appropriate spaces for specific kinds of actionsand appoint protagonists for particular preconfigured roles. Whenthe fighting is done and it demands to be described, understood,and especially justified, then the war myth becomes the ultimateordering principle.But how is the myth evoked, and who invokes it? Whetherthe barrage of disruptive sound and the petal on the sleeping faceare remembered depends on how the story is told, and who tellsit. However, in most cultures' myths it is men who tell these stories,and they remember the components that add to the notion thatwar is an arena for the display of men's manliness and heroism.Thus, we see that details are not in themselves intrinsically im-portant; they acquire long-term significance only if they find a con-text and a narrator to accommodate them. The ill-shaped compo-nents, e.g., the heroic women combatants, may tease for a while,may disturb apparently self-evident categorizations and classifica-tions. However, if they are not given due heed within their owncontexts and by multiple narrators, if they are not allowed to func-tion outside the stranglehold of the mythic and too often malemold, they will soon be forgotten. I want these clumsy compo-nents, these heroic women combatants, to survive the manipula-tions of time.The license to write the war experience at once defies the ma-nipulations of time and destroys the neat and generally dichoto-mous categories that have shaped the Western war narrative sinceHomer and the Arab war story since the Ayyamal-Arab. It renders


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transparentthe blatant falsifications nherent in other war narra-tives that continue to describeall war experience, however differ-entiated, in the same mythicterms.The old war storyin the West,as in the Arabworld, erases the experience by squeezing it into abipolar mold. When critics like Fussell disdainfully dismiss ascatharsis all war fiction unmediated by time, it seems to me thatwhat they are actuallydismissing is not so much the story as itsimpact: what they correctly perceive to be threatening signs ofchange in the story.So manyloose ends, they may never be neatlytied. Such a situationis intolerable.In war,without closure, thereis uncertain meaning. In war, without clear meaning, there isdoubt about the warproject. In war,where there is doubt there isa weakening of the will to fight. The spectre of the wimp-thedreaded alter ego to the male hero-looms large.Hanley ascribesthe reflexive male need for time and the di-chotomous order it brings to a bellicosementalitythat createsarbitraryategorieshat arepresumed o be mutually xclu-sive and hostile(self/other,masculine/feminine, hite/black,us/them), ndof theninsisting n thesupremacyf one cate-goryover the other.... Sincethe assertion f the supremacyof onecategory veranotherrequires, boveall,an inflexibledefinitionof membership,he bellicosemind is always esis-tantto anyerosionof its"mystic oundaries."7)Whether the insistence on these mystic boundaries in itselfdenotes bellicosity s debatable,but what I shallargue is that theseboundaries do play an important part in constructing, ustifying,and enabling the easy and unchanging reiteration of war and itsnarration. It is not new that front and home front, combatantandcivilian,friend and foe, defensive and offensiveactions,victoryanddefeat3are not so easily distinguishable;not new at all thatcombat-antsare not alwaysmale, nor that noncombatantsare not necessar-ily female or feminized. Yet,that is the frame that has shaped andcontained most cultures' war stories. It was the way war was re-membered until the late 20th century,until perhapsVietnam andthe postcolonialera.What is new since the '60s is that the mysticboundaries thatstakedout a binaryworld have begun to be represented and dis-


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cussed. This representation and these discussions have revealedthat the mystic boundaries are at least in part responsible for theprosecution of war. What has changed since Vietnam and in thepostcolonial era is that war is increasingly represented as spread-ing beyond its conventional boundaries. It is not a peaceful societybut one that is at war that not only tolerates but encourages thegrowth of a military-industrial complex. In this postcolonial pe-riod, war metaphors abound, but I would suggest that by theirvery abundance they cease to be metaphors. As the sociolinguistGeorge Lakoff tells us so starkly, "[m]etaphors can kill" (59-72).The inner city drug wars, in late April 1992 climaxing in the Rod-ney King riots in Los Angeles, and the failed wars on poverty areproducts of the militarization of postmodern society. In Pure War,Paul Virilio has written that volens nolens we are civilian soldierswaging hi-tech Pure War "which isn't acted out in representation,but in infinite preparation (which leads) toward a generalized non-development ... of civilian societies" (56). How can we unsubstan-tiate such a grandiose claim? We cannot, but we can pursue it as athesis to see whether or not Virilio etches the conditions of a worldin which violence has increasingly become its own justification.Postcolonial wars, of which the Vietnam War and the GulfWar are vivid examples, during their waging exploded binary op-positions, overflowed all categories. In Vietnam, the confusion be-tween warrior and peasant, between South Vietnamese friend andVietcong foe when both looked alike, and between masculinity andfemininity became a commonplace of American filmic and literaryrepresentations. At times, even the boundary between the war andits representation was erased, so that performance could no longerbe considered to be "not reality,"but rather part of it. Indeed, dur-ing the filming of ApocalypseNow, Coppola and the Filipino armyrotated military material according to need.The merging of reality and performance that marked Viet-nam can be seen in other postcolonial wars; in Soweto as in theWest Bank, demonstrations and military reprisals merged withstreet theater performances (Slymovics 18-38). In the postcolonialperiod, war has been technologized to the extent that its represen-tation has become implicated in its waging. As Simon During haswritten, "the fusion of theater and war, war as theater, is a productof modern communications technology" (37). Sophisticated media


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interact with and sometimes supplant superguns. Television view-ers are becoming increasingly aware that the media closes the gapbetween the reality of war and its representation. Coverage of theGulf War in the United States emblematized the conflation(Hoynes 305-26). Many have discussed the erasure of the bound-ary between the lens of the bomber pilots and that of the U.S. tele-vision viewers. Judith Butler writes that

the visual record of this war is not a reflectionn the war,butthe enactment of this phantasmaticstructure, indeed, partof the very meansby whichit is sociallyconstituted and main-tained as a war. The so-called"smartbomb" recordsits targetas it moves in to destroyit-a bomb with a cameraattached nfront, a kind of optical phallus; it relays that film back to acommand controland thatfilmis reshownon television,effec-tively constitutingthe television screen and its viewer as theextended apparatusof the bomb itself. In this sense, by view-ing we are bombing, identified with both bomber and bomb... and yet securely wedged in the couch of one's own livingroom. (75-76)However, in the Gulf War the conflation of reality and repre-sentation in the media went beyond the collapse of the screen; ithad above all something to do with the role of the media in the"100-Day War."A chronicle of the coverage of the war reveals thatthe media slipped constantly between reinforcing and undermin-

ing its differences from the reality lived in the Arabian desert. Inits representative function, it seemed to maintain an independentperspective that allowed it to target and name what it willed: theline in the sand could be a metaphor for blurred boundaries be-tween the two armies, just as it could conversely describe sharplydemarcated zones. As participant, it lost this freedom to find itselfconstrained by its drive for power and influence. Between August1990 and March 1991, it was not always clear that it was GeneralNorman Schwartzkopf who was briefing the TV news anchor starTed Koppel; it often seemed to be the reverse.The liberty and sanction to narrate and represent directly thewar experience captures these paradoxical moments. It does notattempt to resolve the paradox by eliminating inconvenient com-ponents; it allows contradictions to coexist. In so doing, it reveals


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that the disorganized,unarmed violence awayfrom the epicenterof the theater of operations lies on a continuum with the "orga-nized" whole that is called "war."The recognition of this contin-uum disables automaticadjudicationabout who has the right towrite when about what. In contemporarycivil wars like those inLebanon, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka and increasingly inU.S. inner cities, it is less and less clear when it is war and when itis peace.4 By the same token, it may be equally unclear when awriter is writing about "war"and when about "peace," especiallywhen euphemisms like "the events," "the situation,""collateraldamage,"and "neutralizingassets"abound. Not only the warzonebut the writers' guild collapses: the narration of postcolonial warsis no longer a male preserve. These war stories, although "men'sdomain," may also be interpreted as being about peace, "wom-en's domain."Before Vietnam, Lebanon, and the Cold War, women werenot supposed to write of war. Often, as in Cassandra's case, theywere not even to speakof war. Margaret Higonnet has shown howthe European literary establishment rejected women's writings onthe two world wars. Their pretext was that women could not expe-rience the war firsthand and that they, being denied the experi-ence, should not presume to write of it.5 But was it true that thewomen had not experienced these wars? Of course not. However,because they had not been written, or had not written themselves,into the war, it was, with time, easy to conclude that women hadnot been there. In the interval, the wars had been re-membered,or, rather, crafted anew to fit their cultures' myths of how warswere thought to be fought. Ambiguities and inconsistencies wereeliminated: men were warriors, women were watchers. Warriorstalked about other warriors, women waited and listened.e * *

The post-1948 wars in the Arab world demonstrate the trans-formation in the reality of war and its representation in the post-colonial era. This transformation is at once military and discursive.In what follows, I shall focus primarily on the literary impact ofthis change on women. There has not been a single way of repre-senting their participation in combat, however defined; nor havethere been uniform controls on their writings. During the AlgerianRevolution, as well as in pre-1967 Israel, Arab women fought, but


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they fought as men, and women's writingswere subjectto men'scontrol and therefore often also to internal censorship.Althoughthe waging and writing of war were on the cusp of change, pres-sure to conform to conventional notions of war telling was toogreat to be withstood.This has not been so much the case in thepost-'67Israeli-occupied erritoriesor in Lebanon,or even in Iraq.The Algerian Revolution of 1954-62 provides a paradox: itset a precedent for women'svisibility n nationalstruggle, yet it hascome to be regarded as also the source of their ills in the patriar-chalpostcolonialsocietyto whichit gavebirth.Severalreasonsmaybe adduced for women's failureto exploit their opportunitiesdur-ing the Algerian Revolution. Firstly,the years of French colonialdomination had been marked by attempts to coopt Algerianwomen through education and acculturation.Algeriaof 1962 re-mained resistant to new values and concepts such as women'srightsbecausethey were linked with the hated, now departedcolo-nial overlord.Hence, Algerianwomen did not have a feminist con-text within which to situate their struggle. This latter point is sig-nificant from both a military and a literary perspective. Thewomen did what the men wanted them to do. Even when theywere in charge of operations (Shaaban 182-219), they acted inplace of men, never in ways that highlighted their otherness tothe new role and the unprecedented nature of their visibilityandbehavior.Cross-dressingdemanded conformityto the rules regu-lating the role. With such an attitude, they could change neitherthe role nor their consciousness. Thinking as men, they antici-pated thatparticipationand self-sacrificewould produce theirownrewards.They did not realize that they had to fight to be recog-nized and to be remembered. They did not understand that theyshould not allowthemselvesto be caught up in the warof symbolsthat alwaysfollows the war of weapons. They allowed their returnto the home, to the domain of women's activity, o epitomize thereturn of "peace."From then on, peacewas conservedby eliminat-ing ambiguityin the roles men and women played.Algerianwomen did not recognizethe importanceof conserv-ing the role ambiguity brought about by women acting in men'sspace, the advantages to be gained by confusing expectations ofhow men and women should behave. Unliketheir sisters, students,and spiritual heirs from Northern Ireland6 to Palestine, they did


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not realize that to change status quo they had to (1) emphasizetheir importance as women to Algerian success in the war; (2) con-tinually affirm, particularly in writing, their presence and its im-portance so as not to be ignored or forcibly repressed; (3) articulatetheir experiences not as cross-dressing but as transformative; and(4) act in terms of the discourse they had thus created. Of course,many Algerian women wrote, but later. It was not enough to writelater. They should have written at once. Since they did not, it wasthe men's books that flooded the market. Consequently, the storywe now have of the women in the Algerian Revolution is one thattells what happenedto the women and not what the womendid. EvenDjamila Boupacha's story is known primarily through the writingof Simone de Beauvoir and Gisele Halimi.My comparative readings of Algerian women's and men's warliterature indicate that, whereas the women themselves were notaware of their importance, the men were and they overreacted.Their writings reflect the post-World War I writings that Sandra

Gilbert and Susan Gubar have analyzed in No Man's Land:ThePlaceof the WomanWriter n the20th Century(1988). Whereas the Britishwomen writers were scarcely aware of the significance of women'snew visibility and particularly of their participation in the GreatWar, the men were wracked with anxiety. In Algeria, men likeMuhammad Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, and Malek Haddad wrote onthe one hand of Medusas and of monstrous daughters, and on theother hand of paralyzed and impotent intellectual men. Althoughwomen writers like Djamila Debeche and Assia Djebar graduallycame to write about the war, they were less concerned with theirjust desserts than they were with the end of the war. The persis-tent problem for women of biculturalism (i.e., European-style ed-ucation entailing certain expectations but marriage into non-European circumstances that made a mockery of such promises)was censored out of their fiction as men demanded total attentionto the nationalist struggle. In LesEnfantsduNouveau Monde (1962),which was written and published in the last year of the war, Djebardid write of the new roles women were playing, but without anysense of moment. Even the dramatic first emergence out of thehouse and crossing of the city by the veiled Cherifa is presented asintimidating rather than as empowering. Her heroines seemed notto know that they might profit from their war experiences. Even


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in the one realm in which women fought as women, donating theirbodies to the cause by alternately dressing as French women sothat they might place bombs in the nouvelle ville and then reveil-ing so that they might hide the bombs they were moving aroundthe medina, Djebar's assessment is negative: Touma is clearly aprostitute. The fact that, like women in the two world wars, theAlgerian women had functioned effectively in roles traditionallyassigned to men did nothing to change their self-image. They heldon to the roles society had assigned to them. Neither they nor thecontext were redefined to accommodate a new reality. Women whofor a period had done what men do went back to doing women'sthings. Status quo ante became everyone's overriding goal: to themen it represented a reaffirmation of control in the family; to thewomen it meant that the war was over and the foreigners had beenexpelled. The need for peace and self-governance after almost acentury and a half of resistance and tutelage precluded the possi-bility of change. It was only considerably later that people beganto understand the lessons of other 20th-century wars, particularlythe Spanish Civil War-in other words, that political wars are ofteninseparable from social revolutions.7 In the absence of a concertedattempt on the women's part to change their situation or even onlyto write of the war as transforming, Algerian men quickly imposeda neotraditional system that deprived the dreaded "new women"of any voice. Literary evidence supports recent sociopolitical con-tentions by women like Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas that Algerianwomen were not so much forced back into oppression as they wereblocked from pursuing opportunities they had not at the time rec-ognized (104-14).The transformation in the war narrative in the postcolonialperiod can be read in a single literature of the Arab world: Pales-tinian women's writings on two of their wars with the Israelis, thefirst in 1948 and the other the Intifada that broke out almost 40years later. Many, especially political scientists, would contest myclassification of the Intifada as a war except in the purely meta-phoric sense.8 However, I contend that it is. As I shall argue below,the Intifada may not confront equivalent forces, but it does line upa nation against the army of a nation-state. Above all, it functionswithin the parameters of military constructs.Both men's and women's writings of the early post-1948 pe-


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riod out of Israel reflect great ambivalence about the Israelis aswell as about their own status and future. There is little of the lateranger that marks the post-'67 writings by Palestinians worldwide.The major concerns of both men and women writers from withinIsrael are survival with dignity and the establishment of a just ifpatriarchal society. There is no hint that radical changes must becontemplated so as better to confront new challenges. To the con-trary, traditional values and roles, particularly for women, are en-forced and often by women like Najwa Qawar Farah.

The year 1967 marks the beginning of a seismic shift. Wars inthe Arab world, which until then had been treated as discreteevents, usually in connection with a colonial power, came to beregarded as systemic. The Palestinians' plight became a pan-Arabcause, if not always in reality then certainly in rhetoric. With thiscame a change in expectations of Palestinian women's behaviorand, coincidentally, of their writing. Five years after the end of theAlgerian Revolution, Palestinians were invoking its lessons: the useof violence in the struggle for independence; the indispensabilityof women to national liberation; and the importance for women ofremaining vigilant on all fronts so as to be able to withstand whatthe literary critic bell hooks has called "interlocking systems ofdomination" (175) that would force a repetition of Algerian wom-en's experience.9 Palestinian women writers, in concert with theirIrish and South African counterparts, are claiming that not onlyare women as actors playing out new as well as traditional rolesvital to the nationalist revolution but so is feminism as an ideologyof radical social change.The poetry, autobiographies, novels, and short stories ofFedwa Tuqan, Sahar Khalifa, and Halima Jauhar already in thelate '60s and '70s draw the contours of the Intifada, which actuallybroke out in 1987. This popular uprising derived its name fromthe term the women had been using for 20 years to describe theirwomen-specific ways of resisting Israeli aggression in Gaza andthe West Bank. Their resistance drew upon strategies women havebegun to practice worldwide.The mothers in South Africa and inYugoslavia, the Women in Black in Israel, the Madres of the Plazade Mayo all have recognized the power of the spectacle.10Women,particularly in the guise of "mothers," theatricalize confrontations


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and the struggle to control public space and attention. They areusing the media against the guns.This initiative and leadership by women as womenin nationalstruggle is one of the most visible aspects of the change in postcolo-nial warfare. In their struggle to control public space and atten-tion, they refuse to play men's roles. As never before, women areoccupying what were defined as male-specific arenas, but they doso as women, and, again, particularly as mothers. The womanwhose resistance as a woman succeeds cannot be absorbed into agender-neutral, or better, male movement. Out of a space pre-sumed to be closed to her, she has asserted her right to launchaction. Because the system is in crisis, normal policing proceduresare on hold. Not only is there access to that space, but the fact ofaccess changes that space into a hyperspace. It is no longer thefront, that space that Cynthia Enloe tells us must always be rede-fined-relocated so as to remain that place where women are not.It has become the hyperspace of the home front, what Doris Les-sing calls a "habit of mind, a structure of feeling, a cultural predis-position" (qtd. in Hanley 7), that ambiguous place that is neitherhome nor front because it has become both. And it houses Virilio's"civilian-soldiers," who are neither civilians nor soldiers becausethey have become both.Palestinian women writers are aware of the advantages ofmixing roles and genders in the hyperspace, and they describe andthus inscribe the process. Their stories of women going out intothe streets and, under the ever watchful eye of the internationaltelevision cameras, confronting soldiers with the vulnerable bodiesof themselves and their children demonstrate how all the familiarbinaries that structure the Israelis' expectations of and training forwar are thrown into confusion. Soon after the men took it overin December 1987, the women-specific nature of the Intifadachanged. The sporadic, individual happenings were controlledand strategized. The use of arms was encouraged, and young menwearing the national symbol of the kuffiyeh,or checkered scarf, tiedabout the head in a distinctive manner, became soldiers it was "le-gitimate" to shoot.In her 1990 novel Babal-Saha, Khalifa explores women's atti-tudes to the organizing and centralizing of the resistance and to


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20 Miriam Cooke

the mobilizing of young men. Nuzha, the prostitute heroine, com-pels the men who enter her life to acknowledge that women's ways,often domestic ways, including unarmed, disorganized, fragmen-ted struggle by women and children, were still the best way toachieve the kind of results they wanted. After seeing 20 men climbto their death as they try to get into an Israeli military headquar-ters, the prostitute offers an alternative access: through a trapdoorin her kitchen, to an underground passage, and then up into theheart of the headquarters."More than the Intifada, which blurred and challenged someof the binaries usual to war, yet had to acknowledge others, theLebanese Civil War defied conventional categorizations. It con-fronted and undermined all the black and white distinctions that,once established, enable the tired repetition of the War Story, thatreassuringly familiar skeleton we merely flesh out with new details.The Lebanese Civil War lent itself to multiple unorthodox nar-rations, especially by women (Cooke, War'sOtherVoices). t allowedthe women to rewrite the violence so that, for example, passivity,endemic to many moments of war, could be written as activism.This discursive transformation can be read in women's evolvingdescriptions of waiting, that aspect of war that Fussell describes asso debilitating, probably because it is so feminizing (75-78). Duringthe 7-year period that preceded the Israeli Invasion in June 1982,women like Emily Nasrallah wrote progressively of their staying inLebanon and waiting as first "Doing Nothing," then as "Survival,"and finally as "Resistance" (qtd. in Cooke, War'sOtherVoices).Withtime, they described this staying in Lebanon, which had originallybeen unthinking, as though it were a need, a response to a mater-nal instinct. Lebanon was a child in pain, it had to be protected.If mothers-not, of course, biological mothers, but rather whatSara Ruddick calls "maternal thinkers"-did not care for Lebanon,who would?

By the early 1980s, the women's writing became more assert-ive and self-consciously resistant. The tolerance of those who wereleaving was fast disappearing. They were beginning to realize thatwhenever there was an opportunity to leave, it was generally thewomen who stayed and the men who departed. And when theystayed, the women remained vigilant against the war. As EvelyneAccad writes, whenever the demarcation line between the predom-


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inantly Christian East and the Muslini West Beirut closed, it wasthe women who organized or, like Andree Chedid, wrote aboutorganizing protest marches. They believed, depite all odds, in apossible reunification and to this end they were prepared to sacri-fice their lives (Accad 78-90). It was not that the men had no con-science and the women did, but rather that they had a differ-ent notion of responsibility. Whereas men, both writers and maleprotagonists in women's writings, pointed the finger of blame atothers, particularly the fighters and every possible -ism, womenconstantly affirmed that responsibility is shared by all. Individualinnocence, Ghada Samman insists, is not possible in a guilty society(14-15). The women's writings articulate their transformed con-sciousness. Whereas they had originally stayed out of selflessness,they were now staying to resist Lebanon's total destruction. Aboveall, they were staying to achieve for themselves a sense of self, aswomen and as Lebanese citizens.

Despite apparent differences in the nature of the Intifada andthe Lebanese Civil War, their writings are comparable. What isshared is exemplified in a comparison between men's and women'swritings. For the women writers, these are wars in which binarystructures are recognized to be artificial and unhelpful in trying tounderstand and resolve their conflicts. In this destabilized context,Lebanese and Palestinian women are the ones to take the initiativein the struggle and to forge a new relationship between the indi-vidual and the collective. This relationship is premised on care foreach other and on the hope for survival for oneself and by exten-sion for the society as a whole. Lebanese and Palestinian men'swritings, mirroring women's literary assessments of men's politicalactions, tend to trivialize the women's new strategies and the reali-ties they produce. At the same time they continue to advocate thepursuit of traditional organized, armed conflict, however suicidaland unsuccessful it may have proved itself to be. Thus do they seekto rehabilitate the familiar binarisms. Wars in such a worldviewseem to be necessary, the only solutions to apparently irresolvableconflicts.The 8-year Iran-Iraq War would seem to be quite different,yet my reading of its literature suggests changes in war representa-tion comparable to those that have taken place during other post-colonial wars waged in the Arab world. Like its successor, the Gulf


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22 Miriam Cooke

War, it was more a parody of conventional or, better, Total War.In 1980, Saddam Hussein launched what he thought would be ablitzkrieg. It was to be a show of strength, a bid for the leadershipof the Arab world. In anticipation of an easy, resounding victory,in 1979 he was already lining up artists and artisans-whom hethus implicated in the military venture-to construct before theevent its happy outcome. To boost the significance of the expectedvictory, Hussein dipped randomly into history's grab bag and, withthe help of artists and writers, pastiched together a glossy facadethat included New Babylons, Sharifian descents, and Qadisiyas.'2The reality of the slaughter of little boys and old men in the mudwas replaced by the reassurance of glorious monuments and victo-rious stories. Eight years later, exhausted and his army and arsenaldepleted, Hussein declared a victory that allowed the fighting tostop. Most of the Iran-Iraq war literature, like most of its culturalproduction, was state commissioned and published. Conferencesand festivals were held to give a platform to this new literature.Only a few were able to overcome atomization and retain the senseof responsibility that many assumed all Iraqi writers and artistshad perforce lost.13 So closely did some artists collaborate with thegovernment that their works came to shape reality. Victory andmartyr monuments were constructed before any victory was insight; millennial literary series celebrating the war were conceivedbefore the war had even started. Image-making replaced creativereflection and production.'4 Could this be art, or was it pure pro-paganda? Can patronized but also terrorized writers question thevalidity of a patriotic war? How does one read such texts? Onereads between the lines. Sometimes there is nothing there. Some-times it turns out that there is nothingon the line; everything is inthe "between."15

So, I have read between the lines of both women's and men'sfiction on the Iran-Iraq War. Careful not to write of the front,women writers like Suhayla Salman, Aliya Talib, and Lutfiya al-Dulaymi were bravely critical of the war. They alluded, eventhough necessarily obliquely, to the ways in which the state hadcoopted not only people's minds but also their bodies, especiallywomen's bodies. Women, who had achieved considerable gains inaccess to educational and professional opportunities, including


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Arab WomenArabWars 23

militaryservice, and even in some cases to equal pay, were toldduring the warthey should turn their bodies over to the state andproduce at least five children, preferably boys. Salman'sstrongwomen disdainfullyreject PatrioticMotherhood.Yet, ironically, tis as mothers-not Patriotic,but rather Resisting Mothers-thatthey unmask a system that would turn their boys, the country'sfuture, into dead heroes; they, like the Argentinian Madres andthe Mothers of the Intifada,claim as each her own those non-kinmen who are aboutto be wasted;they hold together a fragmentingsociety.Talib's stories again and again satirize notions of heroicmasculinityand passive femininity in times of war that producenothing but corpses. In 1988, the apparently pro-Baathistwomanal-Dulaymi published Seedsof Fire.Appropriately enough for awoman writer, t refers only tangentiallyto the war and as thoughit were infinitelydistant. This "home front novel" revolves aroundLayla, a graphic artist working for an advertising agency whileher husband is awayat the mines. As in Lebanese and PalestinianKuenstlerromanen theirwars,the role of the woman artistnarratoris crucial. Through her creative production, Layla is liberatedfrom the constraintsof her body so that she may enter the hereto-fore forbidden zone of maleexchange. Her presence in the agencyis doubly disruptive: t is repeated that she is the only woman em-ployee; her artwork is so accomplished and increasinglyradicalthat it threatensto ruin the business. How? Her male director fearsthat if she emphasizesthe aestheticaspectof her work,consumerswillfocus on the creatorof the messagerather than on the messagealone. Prospectiveconsumerswill think before buying. The paral-lels between these marketing strategies,and the production anddissemination of propaganda are striking. For when the peoplebecome aware that values they had thought to be essential are infactpackagedgoods that they are supposed to consume spontane-ously, they will begin to doubt the imperativesof martyrdomandpatriotism.Seedsof Fireseems to suggest that during the war thewoman artistmayfind at the very heart of a totalitariansystemthekey to its undoing.Although some of the men write of women warriors,16hewomen do not. This is surprisingin view of the fact that in 1976women alreadyhad begun to enlist into popular militiaforces andby 1982 their numbers had swollen to 40,000.17 Why? I would sug-


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24 Miriam Cooke

gest that this is the case because women soldiers, after all, are doingwhat the men are doing. These Iraqi women write of what thewomen are doing as women.They write on and through the war,yet also against it. They write their protest into a war they are sup-posed to support. Like the post-'48 Palestinian literature out ofIsrael, men and women seem to be subject to similar pressures.Yet, in Iraq it is primarily the women who have found ways towrite against the war. For the men, who were more assured of anaudience or, at least, of censorship, criticism was a more riskybusiness.My reading of Arab writers' fiction on their wars since 1948suggests that attention to women, both as fighters and as writers,reveals a change in warfare and its representation over the past 40years. During precolonial and colonial wars, women's participationin national conflict is presented as a copy of men's ways of fighting;they are femmes soldats. Temporary and expedient gender role

reversals do not lead to narratives of role transformations or evenambiguities. In conventional war, women do not have the space toimagine another way to live or to fight. Like the Algerian women,they are temporarily transformed into something they know theydo not wish to become. However, when writing out of postcolonialwars, many Arab women describe and extol women's agency aswomen in what used to be, but thus ceases to be, a male-only space.Their trespassing bodies break down the black and white distinc-tions that had shaped the war story and allow them to createcountervisions of society and of war. In Lebanon, the women wroteof the need to reject the old norms of emigration and to stay, toadopt responsibility for the chaos, and to work for the survival ofthe self, of others, and of the country. Their message was stay andthus stop the war. Although in the wake of the war of 1967 thePalestinian women were agreed with the men on the need to resistthe occupation, they did not agree on the means. They opposedthe use of confrontational violence, which enabled the Israelis tofight as they had been trained to fight. They called for transformedsocial arrangements and gender relations and a valorization ofwomen's ways of fighting so as to resist more effectively. The Iraqiwomen writers showed that their society's male-dominated valuesand the war they created were self-destructive. Since they could


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not with impunity criticize their leader, they directed themselvesto their readers. Their writing creates citizens with a consciencewho can see through the manipulation that mobilizes a whole na-tion to fight a foolish war.In all of the Arab women's literature on postcolonial wars,images of motherhood have acquired centrality. The nurturingpersona, who in the literature of the colonial period seemed benton molding her daughter into her own oppressed shape, hasmultiplied so as to be able to play numerous roles. These mothersare both aggressive and pacific, patriotic and nationalist, desiringand destructive, martyr and prisoner. They may be all of these atonce or at different times. Motherism as a multi-faceted strategy ofresistance in postcolonial war and its literature is no longer a"mere" social fact; it has become a resisting act. As such, it is con-stantly reconstructed to suit its challenges. No boundary is so resil-ient that it cannot bend.Postcolonial wars have transformed the relationship betweenwomen's participation in war and its narration: the change inwomen's experience has found a necessary corollary in the changein discourse. Women are inscribing their experiences in war intothe war story. They are thus countering others' naming of women'sexperiences as having not been in war. The delicate balancing actbetween experience and its recording must be maintained so thataction and its recording will remain in tension. The politicalmother only retains efficacy if she is writtenas politically effective.Yet, at the same time, she will only continue to have a literary voiceif she can hold on to political agency. The postcolonial war writerrealizes that her writing-the struggle to reclaim language in sucha way that it will empower and no longer suppress her-is criticalto her understanding of the role she may play in the war theater.Out of postcolonial war, women write to transform themselves,their relationships with others, and, by extension, the social con-text. Whereas Algerian women fought as men, Arab women afterthem have fought as women and often as mothers. Their participa-tion cannot be forgotten or eliminated as women playing at men'sroles, as cross-dressing, because it is written and will therefore beremembered as women fighting as women. These women writershave found a space in which to make their voices heard, and theirheard voices are changing that space.


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26 MiriamCooke

I would like to conclude with the words of Hanan Ashrawi,the spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation at the 1990sMiddle East Peace Talks who expresses eloquently and forcefullythe difference women make in war:And if we lose sight of the human substance then we lose sightof the basic essence of all our work.... Men always choose thepolitics of domination and destruction.... It is time to tran-scend the pain of the moment and to impose a woman's solu-tion on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the women's solu-tion is based on equality, on non-discrimination, on thepreservation of life and rights and on addressing the core is-sues of justice, freedom, with candor and with courage, notwith weapons and power.

NotesI would like to thankEvelyneAccad,Bruce Lawrence,PaulVieille,andJaneTompkinsfor reading earlier draftsof this article and for their helpful sugges-tions.1. In the wake of the GulfWar,CynthiaEnloewritesthat"contemporarywar-fare made the conceptual divide between combat and non-combatirrelevant"(107).2. "Hemingwayhas written that some events are of such magnitudethat 'ifawriterhas participated n them his obligationis to write them trulyrather thanassume the presumptionof altering them with invention"' Prefaceto Regler'sTheGreatCrusade1940), qtd.in Thomas 10).Ortega y Gasset,on the other hand,

found "therealityof lived experience and aestheticexpressionare incompatiblein art"(qtd.in Thomas20).3. In this connection,it is worth noting that SaddamHussein celebrated theanniversaryof his victory n the GulfWar, aying,"Weemerged triumphant romthatwar"(Hoagland).4. In YasmineGooneratne'spoem on the Sri LankanCivilWar,entitled "ThePeaceGame,"she writes of childrenplayingwar and peace. She concludes:"Wecalled the entertainment Peace'/or War'-I can't rememberwhich ..."5. Higonnet, "NotSo Quiet in No Woman'sLand."See alsoVirginiaWoolf'sThreeGuineas,n which she claims that women have not been consideredcapableof writingabout war(9). See BouthainaShaaban182-219.6. Rita O'Hare, the head of the Sinn Fein Departmentof Women'sAffairs,saidat the Irish Women United Conference n 1981:Women in the RepublicanMovement have worked for, and wel-comed, in recent years, the recognition by the Movement of theimportance of building and developing a real policy on women'sstruggle and attemptingto carrythat out, just as it has realised theimportanceof developingthe struggle n the labourmovement,with-


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out which socialism cannot be built.... In the aftermath of nationalliberation struggles around the world we have seen attempts made toforce women who were active in those struggles alongside men backinto subordinate roles in the new society. This danger cannot be over-come by standing on the sidelines. It can only be totally negated bythe fullest possible involvement of determined women in the heart ofthat struggle. (22)7. Thomas writes that this linkage isa positive aspect which is lacking in the classical war novel. Man is nothere a pawn of the possessing classes sent to fight a colonial war inthe interests of capitalist exploitation, but a defender of rights by dintof collective political and syndical action. (13)

8. Paul Vieille, in a reaction to this essay, wrote in a letter to me that theIntifada is "not war in the real meaning of the term, i.e., the confrontation ofarmies. It is rather a new form of opposition to a national domination, a non-military resistance to oppression by another. It is only war in the metaphoricsense."9. In her 1980 novel Abbadal-shams,Sahar Khalifa writes:What happened to the Algerian women after independence? Womenreturned to the rule of the harem and to covering their heads. Theystruggled, carried arms and were tortured in French prisons-Ja-mila, Aisha and Aishas. Then what? They went out into the light andthe men left them in the dark. It was as though freedom was re-stricted to men alone. What about us? Where is our freedom and howcan we get to it? They shall not deceive us! (119)10. Michael Rogin says that spectacles,in the postmodern view, define the historical rupture between indus-trial and post-industrial society-the one based on durable goodsproduction, the other on information and service exchange. With thedissolution of individual subjectivities and differentiated autonomousspheres, not only does the connection between an object and its usebecome arbitrary .. . but skilled attention to display also deflects no-tice from the object to its hyperreal, reproducible representation.The society of the spectacle provides illusory unification and mean-ing, Guy Debord argues, distracting attention from producers andfrom classes in conflict. Simulacric games have entirely replaced thereal, in Jean Baudrillard's formulation, and offer not even a counter-feit representation of anything outside themselves. (106)11. When I interviewed Sahar Khalifa in Nablus in June of 1991, I asked herabout the domestic symbolism evident in this her most recent novel. Her reactionwas first confusion and then amusement. She said that she had not chosen thekitchen site self-consciously, but now she was glad that she had.

12. Qadisiya is the name of the first battle that the Arab Muslims won againstnon-Arabs, in fact Iranians, in 637 C.E.13. At the modern Arabic literature conference held at the University ofNijmegen (Holland) in May 1992, Sabry Hafez attacked me for choosing to takeIraqi war literature seriously. Everybody, he assured me, knew that what thesewomen and men wrote was rubbish. Of what possible value could such propa-ganda be? Samir al-Khalil seems to support such an attitude. He has attacked allartists who stayed in Iraq and continued to create:


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28 Miriam Cooke

The peculiarity of the Iraqi regime therefore is to have involvedenormous numbers of people directly in its crimes over twenty years,while making the rest of the population at the very least complicitin their commission. Yet, everyone inside the country, including theopposition outside, denies all responsibility for what they know hasbeen going on. (TheMonument 129)14. "Substituting symbols for substance, these staged events (Grenada, Libya,etc.) constitute the politics of postmodernism, so long as one remembers thatsymbols produced for consumption at home and abroad have all too much sub-stance for the victims of those symbols, the participant-observers on the ground"(Rogin 116).15. Lev Losev describes the same phenomenon in Russian literature. He ana-

lyzes what he refers to as "slavish"language, which is "a systemic alteration of thetext occasioned by the introduction of hints and circumlocutions" (6). For over100 years, Russians have themselves been using the term "Aesopian"to describesuch techniques. He argues that it emerges in response to state-imposed censor-ship and chronicles over two centuries of writing that had to find ways to expressitself in spite of wary censors.16. Salah al-Ansari writes of Tiswahun, who took up her husband's rifle whenhe was killed. Carrying her baby daughter on her back she forayed into the battle-field and killed many (39).17. Samir al-Khalil, Republicof Fear92.

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Organization of Women." January 1992. EpiscopalLife March 1992: 1.Badron, Margot, and Miriam Cooke, eds. OpeningtheGates:A CenturyofArabFemi-nist Writing.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.Bain, Donald. "WarPoet." 1944. Fussell 296.Butler, Judith. "The Imperialist Subject."Journal of Urbanand CulturalStudies2.1(1991): 73-78.Cooke, Miriam. War'sOtherVoices:WomenWriterson the LebaneseCivil War.NewYork: Cambridge UP, 1988.Cooke, Miriam, and Angela Woollacott, eds. Gendering War Talk. Princeton:Princeton UP, 1993.de Beauvoir, Simone, and Gisele Halimi. Djamila Boupacha. Paris: Gallimard,1962.Djebar,Assia. LesEnfantsdu Nouveau Monde.Algiers: Rene Julliard, 1962.al-Dulaymi, Lutfiya. Seedsof Fire. Baghdad: Si al-Thaqasa wa al-Harb, 1988.During, Simon. "Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today." TextualPractice 1.1(1987): 32-47.Enloe, Cynthia. "The Gendered Gulf." CollateralDamage:The "NewWorldOrder"at Home and Abroad. Ed. Cynthia Peters. Boston: South End P, 1992. 107.


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Fussell, Paul. Wartime:Understandingand Behavior n theSecondWorldWar.Oxford:Oxford UP, 1989.Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: ThePlace of the WomanWriternthe 20th Century.New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.Gooneratne, Yasmine. "The Peace Game." Blood intoInk: Twentieth-Century iddleEastern and South Asian WomenWrite War. Ed. Miriam Cooke and Roshni

Rustomji-Kearns. Boulder: Westview, 1994.Halimi, Gisele. DjamilaBoupacha. Trans. Peter Green. London: New English Li-brary, 1963.al-Hamid Hammudi, Basim Abd. Al-naqid wa qissatal-harb.Dirasa tahliliya [TheCriticand the WarStory].Baghdad: Si al-Thaqasa wa al-Harb, 1986.Hanley, Lynne. WritingWar:Fiction,Genderand Memory.Amherst: U of Massachu-setts P, 1991.Helie-Lucas, Marie-Aimee. "Women, Nationalism, and Religion in the AlgerianStruggle." Badron and Cooke 104-14.Higonnet, Margaret. "Not So Quiet in No Woman's Land." Cooke and Wool-lacott 205-66.Hoagland, Jim. "Unfinished Business Muddies Impact." Denver Post 12 Jan.1992: 18A.hooks, bell. TalkingBack: ThinkingFeminist,ThinkingBlack. Boston: South End P,1989.Hoynes, William. "War as Video Game: Media, Activism, and the Gulf War."Pe-ters 305-26.Khalifa, Sahar. Abbadal-shams. Beirut: Daval-Adab, 1980..Bab al-Saha. Beirut: Daval-Adab, 1990.al-Khalil, Samir. The Monument:Art, Vulgarity, nd Responsibilityn Iraq.Berkeley: Uof California P, 1991.. Republicof Fear: The Politicsof ModernIraq. Berkeley: U of California P,1989.Lakoff, George. "Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify Warin the Gulf."Journal of Urbanand CulturalStudies2.1 (1991): 59-72.Losev, Lev. On the Beneficenceof Censorship:Aesopian Language in Modern RussianLiterature.Trans. Jane Bobkol. Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner in Kommission,1984.O'Hare, Rita. "Irish Women United Conference in 1981." Iris: The RepublicanMagazine 7 Nov. 1983: 22.Rogin, Michael. "'Make My Day!' Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics."Rep-resentations29 (1990): 99-111.Ruddick, Sara.MaternalThinking:Toward PoliticsofPeace. Boston: Beacon P,1989.Samman, Ghada. BeirutNightmares.Beirut: Kawabis Bayrut, 1980.Shaaban, Bouthaina. BothRightand LeftHanded:Arab WomenTalkAboutTheirLives.London: Women's P, 1988.Slymovics, Susan. "'To Put One's Fingers in the Bleeding Wound': PalestinianTheater under Israeli Censorship." Drama Review 35.2 (1991): 18-38.Talib, Aliya. Greening. Baghdad: Si al-Thaqasa wa al-Harb, 1988.Thomas, Gareth. TheNovel of the SpanishCivil War:1936-1975. New York: Cam-bridge UP, 1990.Vieille, Paul. Letter to the author. 20 June 1992.Virilio, Paul. Pure War.New York: Semiotext, 1983.Woolf, Virginia. ThreeGuineas. New York: Harcourt, 1966.

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