Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By Judith Gabriel
"The women did not know how to profit from their war experiences-nor indeed that they might do so," Cooke offers. "In the absence of a concerted attempt on the womens part to change their conditions, the men quickly established a neotraditional system that deprived the women of any voice. Literary evidence supports a recent contention that Algerian women were not so much forced back into oppression as they were blocked from pursuing opportunities they did not at the time recognize." According to Cooke, Algerian women did not realize their potential social transformation partly because there was no feminist context within which to carry on their struggle. "The revolution came too soon in the history of modern Arab womens activism to be recognized as a catalyst for the inscription of feminist issues into the nationalist agenda. War was declared an opportunity that women had failed to exploit." As a result, she writes, Palestinian women would refer to the Algerian experience, debating how they could battle both the nationalist and the feminist causes, and how they could engage in resistance, lobbying for social change, without letting the window of opportunity pass. Five years after the end of the Algerian revolution, its lessons were being invoked by Palestinian women writers who claimed that women were indispensable to the nationalist revolution, stressing the need for radical changes in society that included feminism as an ideology. How that need is ultimately met is yet to be seen, but awareness of womens vital role was stirred decades ago. Women of the Stones By the time the rest of the world became aware of the Intifada, Palestinian women had already been using the term for 20 years to describe their "women-specific ways of resisting the occupation" without bearing arms. Cooke reports that later, as their courageous exploits entered the realm of legend, these women came to recognize the social possibilities inherent in political resistance. They bought to their war participation "the awareness that if political victory is to have any meaning at all, it must entail social transformation." The resistance effort of these women "becomes self-consciously feminine" as they attempt to wage peace rather than to participate in the destruction of war. Cooke notes that they were the first among the Arabs to organize themselves politically, however, many Palestinian women have been too overwhelmed by multiple pressures to focus solely on the womens agenda. She points to the work of Sahar Khalifa ("Wild Thorns," "Sunflower,") who maintained that women should balance their allegiances so that culture, nation, class and gender remain in tension with one another. The tensions are not clear-cut. Khalifa, whom she describes as "the best known woman novelist working in the Occupied Territories," often focuses on gender roles and has been accused of writing only as a feminist. "Writing from inside the Occupied Territories, she is expected to represent her nation uncritically," Cooke says. "Selfcriticism is out." Writing from inside also means she didnt have "the freedom of Palestinian women from elsewhere who can write with impunity about the Israelis and the hardship of separation from the homeland. Equally important, she does not have the distance to overlook the damaging effects of a persisting bourgeois patriarchy." Yet Khalifa confronted the Algerian Lesson, the "fear of the Algerian womens post-conflict disempowerment." In her segment on Palestinian women, Cooke also examines the gender and nationalist lines in the work of Najwa Qawar Farah, Raymonda Tawil and Fadwa Tuqan, each of whom recognized that "womens disadvantaged positions have a negative impact on Palestinian society and its ability to resist." Palestinian women have felt-as had their Algerian sisters-cheated, diminished. Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, former spokesperson for the PLO, complained in 1992 that mens writings about the uprising saw women being again reduced to "the embodiment of the unattained, the perfect goal: fertility, lush land, the womb of society, Palestine itself," their social agency erased. Cooke stresses throughout the book that it is crucial for women to speak and write while their movements still have the stage and their actions are visible. "Women like Rosie the Riveter in America and the Algerian Jamilas learned too late that actions do not carry their own rewards, but that they must be remembered and repeated so as not to be erased." Such is the task of writers. This article appeared in Vol. 5, no. 28 (Summer 1999). Copyright (c) 1999 by Al Jadid - See more at: http://www.aljadid.com/content/miriam-cookes-women-and-warstory#sthash.qUNWLS5t.dpuf