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WOMEN NARRATING THE GULF: A
GULF 
OF THEIR OWN
HAGER BEN DRISS
University of Kairouan
 Abstract
Starting from the premise that space is a purveyor of discourse, this article attempts toprobe the work of three women writers narrating the Gulf. The Kuwaiti Layla al al-ÆUthm®n, the Saudi Arabian Raj®æ Ƨlim and the Iraqi Hadiyya ºusayn write the spacesto which they belong within representational modes speci
fi
c to each region. The conser-vative Kuwaiti society and the holy land of Saudi Arabia generate strategies of camou
fl
age including humor, pardoy and allegory. The bloody history of Iraq, especiallyduring the second half of the twentieth century, yields a subversive confessional moodand a dominating atmosphere of pain. While diverging in tone and narrative strategies,these three women writers converge in presenting a Gulf of their own: a personalizedlandscape wherein the physical world overlaps with psychological scenes. These writersalso succeed in bridging the gap between the private and public and offer narratives in which the personal is relocated in the political, cultural and historical.
Texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and,even when they appear to deny it, they are neverthelessa part of the social world, human life, and of course thehistorical moments in which they are located andinterpreted.Edward Said,
The World, theText and the Critic
1
While the Arabian culture of the Gulf draws attention because of strate-gicinterestinthearea,women’sliterature,andnarrativeinparticular,isvirtu-ally ignored. Aside from a few short stories in English translation, nothingof signi
fi
cance has appeared in foreign languages in terms of translation or literary criticism. Writing a Gulf of their own, these women writers comeup with a narrative complexity that should deserve attention.In this essay, I address the works of three women writers who belong toneighboring spaces of the Gulf, namely the Kuwaiti, Layla al-ÆUthm®n, theSaudi Arabian, Raj®æ Ƨlim, and the Iraqi, Hadiyya ºusayn. In their novels,respectively
 Al-ÆUsÆus
(The Tail, 2002),
 Kh®tam
(2001) and
 Bint al-Kh®n
(The Daughter of al-Kh®n, 2001), they proceed to narrate the Gulf from an
©
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005
 Journal of Arabic Literature, XXXVI, 2
Also available online
 –
 www.brill.nl
1
Edward Said,
The World, the Text, and the Critic
(London: Faber and Faber, 1984).
jal 36.2_f4_151-170 6/10/2005 3:11PM Page 151
 
152
HAGER BEN DRISS
indigenous point of view that belongs to the represented space. Their narra-tives emerge as cultural testimonies to the possibilities as well as the limitsof representation.My argument in this paper is twofold. First, I propose that the Gulf, as aphysical space, generates its own systems of representation. Space manifestsitself as “a site of production of discourse, a speci
fi
c semantic
fi
eld.”
2
Second, and in a similar way, I contend that narrated physical spaces mir-ror psychological concerns. These women writers narrate the gap betweenreality and expectations.Al-ÆUthm®n and Ƨlim use narrative strategies of camou
fl
age as enforcedby social impositions and constraints. ºusayn deals with war within a per-vasive mood of sadness, which can be associated with Iraq’s history, its cli-mate of deep agony and suffering. The three writers negotiate a meetingground between a private space of their own and an established public one.Each has a different focus: Al-ÆUthm®n politicizes the domestic, ÆAlim relo-cates the personal within its cultural dimension, and ºusayn historicizes theprivate. The result is three texts which articulate three different critiques of the Gulf. If there is a common denominator among these three women writ-ers, it is the amount of diversity in their narratives that eludes strati
fi
cation.
 Layla al-ÆUthm®n: “The personal is political”
3
Layla al-ÆUthm®n’s last novel,
 Al-ÆUsÆus
, (The Tail)
4
is provocative in thesense that it poses challenging questions of reading and interpretation. It isnot easy to ascertain whether the writer means it to be a family romance, ahilarious soap opera-like narrative, a parody of happy domesticity, a veiledcritique of patriarchal Kuwaiti society, all of these together or somethingcompletely different. The text itself is a process of veiling and unveiling.While seemingly simplistic in its domestic plot, it is rather sophisticated inits transgressive humor.
 Al-ÆUsÆus
is more episodic than linear as it resists chronological order andsequentiality. Yet, it engages the reader’s attention through a number of techniques that testify to al-ÆUthm®n’s command of short story writing.
5
Thenarrative is divided into
fi
ve sections narrating the story of MaÆy‚f’s family.
2
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White,
 Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(London:Methuen, 1986), p. 194.
3
Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex
(1949; London: Pan Books Ltd., 1988).
4
 Al-ÆUsÆus
(The Tail; Damascus: al-Mad®, 2002).
5
Layla al-ÆUthm®n began publishing short stories in 1976. She has eight collections of short stories. For a brief literary biography of al-ÆUthman, see: Layla MuΩammad —®liΩ,
Udab®æ wa Adib®t al-Kuwait
(Kuwait: R®biflat al-Udab®æ
fi
l-Kuwait, 1996) 187-192.
jal 36.2_f4_151-170 6/10/2005 3:11PM Page 152
 
WOMEN NARRATING THE GULF: A
GULF
OF THEIR OWN
153Each section can be read as an independent entity. The unity of the text ismaintained mainly by the thrust of the plot which is based on Sall‚m,MaÆy‚f and SuÆ®d’s youngest son. The narrative opens with the six-year Sall‚m cutting the tail of a cat. Since the night Sall‚m shouted “my dad hasgot a tail,” upon surprising his father naked, he has started cutting animals’tails. The episode of the cat’s tail is magni
fi
ed. The mother is utterlyterri
fi
ed by the thought of the father’s reaction. If she informs him, Sall‚m will mete out severe punishment to his son. If she keeps silent, she will besexually punished. The last time she concealed a similar event, her husbanddid not touch her for ten days
—
an unbearable punishment for a woman whomeasures her husband’s love and
fi
delity by his sexual desire. The episodeends happily as the aunt intervenes on behalf of Sall‚m.At the age of ten, Sall‚m stops his habit of cutting animals’ tails, but remains violent in his way of correcting whatever he sees as ethically wrong. As the story builds on a number of characters in action, it may be worthwhile to introduce them. Along with Sall‚m, Farzanah, the notoriouslyscandalous woman, and her daughter Fatt‚m occupy a large narrative space.Fatt‚m inherits her mother’s loose morality. Sall‚m appoints himself as acustodian of morality and does not miss any opportunity to harm her.Fatt‚m clings to Wa¥ha, Sall‚m’s sister, despite the latter’s scorn. One dayas Fatt‚m passes in front of Ab‚ Haww®sh, who is exposing his sexualorgan to sun to be cured from leprosy, she makes indecent allusions to hisimpotence. Angry, Ab‚ Haww®sh runs to restrain her, but she pushesWa¥ha into his arms. To avenge his sister, Sall‚m cuts Fatt‚m’s braid. Toavenge her daughter, Farzanah cuts Ab‚ Haww®sh’s sexual organ under theeyes of the fettered Sall‚m. After two days, Sall‚m is discovered chainedand motionless (perhaps dead) besides the corpse of Ab‚ Haww®sh.
 Al-ÆUsÆus
provides a domestic space that mingles laughter and tears. It isthe story of everyday life, with its petty concerns and ordinary occupations.The comic element emanates from the indoor setting as the major site of narration. The kitchen, the parents’ bedroom, and the dining room replacestreets, cities, or towns. There is no indication of larger geographical spaces.Kuwait is never mentioned in the whole narrative. What makes the narratedArab space speci
fi
c to Kuwait is the dialect used in conversations. Language(or dialect) functions, then, as a
synecdoche
, a part of a whole, situating thereader geographically. Footnotes explaining Kuwaiti words, or rather trans-lating them into standard Arabic, are linguistic corridors to shared experi-ence. Al-ÆUthm®n’s use of the Kuwaiti dialect is an invitation to enter apersonal linguistic space, a private domain
—
the realm of the domestic.In this domestic novel, al-ÆUthm®n depicts everyday intimacies of familylife, not adventures of the outside world. Through her domesticated sexual-ity, SuÆ®d, Sall‚m’s mother, conveys the image of the ideal female, marked
jal 36.2_f4_151-170 6/10/2005 3:11PM Page 153
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