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Opening the gates : a century of Arab feminist writing by Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Opening the gates : a century of Arab feminist writing about?

This collection of stories, speeches, essays, poems and memoirs bears fierce testimony to a tradition of brave Arab feminist writing in the face of subjugation by a Muslim patriarchy. Palestinian Fadwa Tuqan's father demanded that she compose political poetry yet kept her secluded from the outside world. Zainaba (last name omitted), a nurse from Mauritania, West Africa, who herself underwent female circumcision, or clitoridectomy, says, "It is not a sin if it is not done, but it is better if it is," and exhorts a group of midwives to modify the disfigurement ("A woman with no clitoris is like a mud wall, a piece of cardboard, without spark, without goals, without desire. . . . It must not be all cut off!") and to use antiseptics. And Egyptian Alifa Rifaat, who wrote in the secrecy of her bathroom until her husband's death, offers stories about a girl undergoing a clitoridectomy and about a bride who fears her husband will discover she isn't a virgin so she inserts powdered glass inside herself to draw blood on her wedding night. Egyptians Ihsan Assal's and Andree Chedid's fiction depicts, respectively, a husband who incarcerates his "recalcitrant" young wife with the permission of

Author

Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke

Publisher

Indiana University Press

Published

1990

Language

EN

ISBN

9781853810312

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Humanities