Abir Hamdar's new book is the first major study of female physical illness and disability in modern Arabic literature. It is a rich and provocative work that makes a much-needed intervention in the fields of Arabic literature and disability studies and fills an epistemological gap.
Structured chronologically, the book focuses on literary works by men and women of the Levant and Egypt from 1950 to the present. In the introduction, Hamdar engages current debates on illness and disability drawing from sociology, the medical humanities, disability studies, and the study of health and medicine, all of which add to the depth and scope of her scholarship. She also makes use of sociocultural–constructionist theorists such as Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas, Erving Goffman, and Bryan Turner. Focusing on disability as a discursive, ideological, and material category, the study traces the gradual transformation of disability in the Arabic novel from a discourse read in metaphorical terms to one focused on the material corporeal experience of women.
Hamdar proceeds with an insightful survey of health and illness in Arabic literature and culture, focusing on the scarcity of scientific studies in Arabic on the anthropology of health and gender; the relation between Islam and scientific advancement; and “spirit possession” as a means to diagnose and cure illness. The first two interventions are not examined in this study, with Hamdar deferring these subjects to future projects. She justifies the conflation of “illness” and “disability” in her study with the lack of research in Arabic on the subject and the interchangeability of the terms in the Arabic language. This comprehensive introduction draws the reader's attention to the author's line of argument, which follows the Arab woman's trajectory from literary invisibility to visibility, from metaphorical representation to physical existence, and from silent absence to voiced presence.
Chapter 1 is devoted to the male writers’ (1950–2000) representation of the disabled female body, which is characterized by the absence of suffering and the use of metaphor to address broader themes. The presentation of the female disabled body as a visible entity rather than a metaphor comes into focus in Chapter 3 where a male writer, Hassan Daoud, presents a disabled woman's body as a physical and tangible reality.
In this latter chapter, Hamdar blames “male writers” such as Mahmud Taymur, Yusuf al-Sibaʿi, and Naguib Mahfouz for excluding the disabled female from the narrative space, where she cannot “escape the home in which male writers had so forcefully placed her” (p. 90). She maintains, for instance, that even though Mahfouz's trilogy “captures the friction between traditional and emerging gender roles . . . Amina's fall and paralysis show that he [Mahfouz] ultimately upholds core patriarchal norms in a fast-changing social milieu” (p. 52). This conflation of the author with the text is problematic as it imposes limits on the text, and raises theoretical questions about the role of the author in the creation of a literary text and the role of language in creating subjectivity.
In Chapter 2, Hamdar explores the representation of female physical illness and disability (1950–2000) by women writers. She maintains that the absence of women is more strongly felt in some women's writing, a point that, in itself, reveals that disability and illness are culturally determined categories implicating both male and female writers. In Huyam Nuwaylati's melodramatic novel, Fi al-Layl (At Night [Syria: n.p., 1959]), the sudden blindness of the protagonist, which cannot be explained scientifically, is no more than a metaphor of the protagonist's depression upon losing the man she loved. The woman is presented in sentimental and melodramatic terms as an object of pity and stoical forbearance.
Other women writers challenge such sentimental literature; in these works a sick mother is not solely an absence but an essential element in the construction of her own daughter's subjectivity. Hamdar's brilliant analysis of Alia Mamdouh's Habbat al-Naftalin (Mothballs) (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1986), Salwa Bakr's al-ʿAraba al-Dhahabiyya La Tasʿad ila al-Samaʿ (The Golden Chariot) (Cairo: Sina li-l-nashr, 1991), and Miral al-Tahawy's al-Khibaʾ (The Tent) (Cairo: Dar Sharqiyat, 1996) reveal how the silent and marginalized mother achieves agency through the daughter who speaks with/for her; this is done not with a “single voice” but with a “double voice,” as the author refers to it. Hamdar persuasively maintains that the works in this chapter simultaneously sanction and contest the dominant norms relating to physical illness and disability. What is intriguing about this chapter and the book as a whole is the systematic manner in which Hamdar addresses nuances between the texts and how each discussion builds on her previous analysis, culminating in her examination of the last three novels.
Because of the dearth of fiction challenging the marginalization and silence of the disabled female in Arabic literature, Hamdar focuses in Chapter 3 solely on three writers: one male writer and two female writers who published their work between 2000 and the present. This chapter, in my opinion, is the most challenging, as it politicizes the disabled female, who shifts from an absent presence to a speaking, fully embodied, and active agent. The novels dealt with are Hassan Daoud's Makiyaj Khafif li-Hadhihi al-Layla (A Little Makeup Tonight) (London: Riyad al-Raʾis li-l-Kutub wa-l-Nashr, 2003), Batool al-Khedairi's Ghayib (Absent) (Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 2004) and Haifa Bitar's Imraʾa min Hadha al-ʿAsr (A Woman of This Modern Age) (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2004). Hamdar provides trenchant insights into the novels by challenging the desexualization of and stigma associated with the disabled female body. Her vivid and insightful analysis of the female characters’ disabled bodies as at once sexualized and desexualized provides a subversive view of a female body free from ideologies of feminine beauty. It is worth adding in this context that while challenging the status quo, Hamdar overlooks the ironic twist in these texts where women's revival is achieved through the medium of male desire, and where their psychological restoration depends exclusively on the way men look at them, no matter what the man's ulterior motives might be (such as ʿAdil's in Khedairi's novel). If the male is responsible for depriving women of their own bodies, it is the male too who initiates their acceptance of their impaired bodies. Is this again the damsel in distress rescued by the knight in shining armor? The closing novel by Haifa Bitar rectifies this problem through a female, Maryam, who undergoes mastectomy and looks at it as the end of her identity as a woman: “‘The end of my breast is the end of man in my life’” (quoted in Hamdar, p. 115). Hamdar maintains that as Maryam writes her body into existence, she gradually comes to the realization that she is no longer “concerned with the world of men” and that she feels “‘a true sense of security’” (quoted in Hamdar, p. 118), especially when she achieves solidarity with other women. The author asserts that having established this homosocial relation, Maryam finally transcends the hierarchical dichotomies of male/female.
Abir Hamdar's thorough, well-researched, and well-documented book, written with great sensitivity, is an important contribution to our understanding of disability in Arabic literature and culture. It also makes a welcome addition to modern Arabic literary studies and disability and health studies. The author's clear and unpretentious style makes the book accessible to a wide range of readers. The work also points to directions for further research on cultural, religious, and gender issues pertaining to illness and disability. The Female Suffering Body comes at an opportune moment when horrendous atrocities are being committed in the region, resulting in a vast number of physically and psychologically victimized women, which makes it all the more noteworthy and germane.
