Feminist narratives, by Salma Brahema

The woman’s exit from language is to be monopolized by man alone, and the male culture’s emphasis on silencing her as a subject. In addition to her marginalization in reality, she will appear in men's literature and culture as a subject of their rhetoric, where they invent images for her; she is the angel and the devil, she is absent and present, she is the beloved and the worshiped, and she is the buried. She is beauty and ugliness, she is the symbol and the example, she is magic, cunning, treachery, and evil lurking around men. Men dominate writing and prevent women from accessing it, especially in our Arab culture, or leave oral storytelling to women, so they add their perspective during recording, and rely on representing her according to their own perceptions of her, based on their different position and their male culture. Therefore, women in this situation had to remain silent, or reproduce images of masculinity and its representations of her, or write (which was rare) to portray themselves, thus neglecting their writing or burying it. Hence, women enter a new civilizational era — the era of writing — and decide to be subjects and topics of their writing at the same time. They put an end to the agency of men in depicting femininity as they desire, which are false images unsupported by what is natural, but derive their legitimacy from a culture created by masculinity. Writing had to shake up all inherited notions, and put femininity and its images under review, questioning, and rejection. Women had to propose alternative images, but before that, they had to declare their entry into language and the era of writing, emerging from the depths of silence, and reclaim their silenced voice and their ability to represent themselves. In the Arab world, storytelling was their effective weapon, and the novel was the literary genre closest to them, due to its artistic flexibility and its openness to various themes.