Heinemann Educational Publishers.

• Author: Simawe, Saadi A.
• Position: Review

Evelyne Accad, Wounding Words, Cynthia Hahn, tr. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1996. 183 pp. Paperback $13.95.

Evelyne Accad, one of the leading feminists in the Arab-American community and in the Arab world, is a fiction writer, poet, singer, and social critic. In her third novel, Wounding Words, the narrator and protagonist is Hayate, a Lebanese-American whose personal history largely parallels that of Accad. Hayate is on leave from a teaching position in the U.S. and is spending a year in Tunisia on an U.S. scholarship to study emerging Tunisian feminism and its formidable struggle in the face of Islamic patriarchal tradition. The novel is both a very sensitive portrayal of Tunisian society, mostly from a female perspective, and also a poignant description of the plight of the minorities in the predominantly Muslim Arab world. As a Lebanese-American, an Arab Christian, and an advocate of Western feminism, Hayate is obviously a very intriguing and highly sensitive character. If it were not for her clear-eyed humanism, Hayate would have fallen victim to ambivalence towards her own identity--a tragic ambivalence that plagues and spiritually paralyzes many minority individuals all over the world in their interaction with the dominant cultures.

Despite her awareness of the sharp binary opposition that has for centuries violently precluded the mutual appreciation between the West and the Islamic East, Hayate is determined to walk a fine line in Tunisian society, embracing what is essentially human and humanistic in both the West and Islamic East. Profoundly in love with Arabic culture, Hayate tries, throughout the novel, to inspire Tunisian women to fight for their human and civil rights in the face of resurgent Islamic fundamentalism that is determined to abolish even the little that Tunisian women have gained. Most of the Tunisian women Hayate encounters are highly educated and intellectual: they use their writing and their limited social space to critique and subvert the dominant patriarchal paradigm in hope of liberating all women. Hayate, Aida, Ahlame, Afafe, Nayla, and other women activists all have distinct feminist approaches, yet all know very well that without full liberation of women there will be no free society. Many feminists in the no vel argue that Marxism, a popular ideology of liberation in the Third World, unfortunately ends with the liberation of the working class; it has no provision for the liberation of...