Anxiety of Erasure is a groundbreaking monograph on Arab fiction by women, intertwining issues of gender, trauma, politics, and war. At a time when the Arab Middle East suffers the grievous tribulations of the Arab Spring and its aftermath and is in the throes of sectarian wars, civil wars, and proxy wars threatening the erasure of nation and society, this book comes as a fresh diagnosis and analysis of cultural discourses on women's subjectivities, bodies, and roles in reconstructing the nation and revisiting tradition to help fight local and global oppression and to heal traumatic wounds.
The overarching trope of this book dedicated to the study of Arab women's writings in the diaspora is the ancestral pre-Islamic act of female infant burial, or waʾd, which was practiced in Arabia and then condemned by Islam. It is a practice that still resonates today in collective Arab culture not only as a traumatic memory of female body erasure but also as an act revived today and extended symbolically to the realm of politics, society, and freedom in the current political context of the Arab Middle East. The book is an extensive and ambitious literary investigation of a rich fictional output by Arab women authors living in the diaspora who have focused their literary and critical gaze on the social and political ills of the homeland left behind. As al-Samman shows, their voices are an extension of the voice of their ancestor storyteller, Scheherazade, who stands here not as a symbol of feminism but as an agent who inscribes change and combats bodily and literary erasure.
Anxiety of Erasure draws on these two important cultural tropes: the figure of the mawʾuda, the female infant buried alive in pre-Islamic culture, and the figure of Scheherazade, the mother of storytelling who tries to go beyond the orality where history has confined her in order to combat death and to ignite social and political change. The book examines the resurfacing of these two cultural tropes and their manifestations through the study of a corpus of work that has defied previous approaches and limitations owing to its transnational and intergenerational character. Covering a rich literature that falls within the domain of adab al-mahjar, diaspora literature, Anxiety of Erasure examines texts penned by Arab women writers in Europe and in North and South America from 1920 to 2011, including Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaykh, Samar Yazbak, Hamida Neʾnaʾ, and Huda Barakat, among other Syrian and Lebanese female writers exclusively using Arabic in their work. Since it first appeared in the Americas in the early 20th century, adab al-mahjar has consisted mostly of poetry and is largely a male-dominated field, despite the existence within the field of many women writers of fiction, whose work is consistently ignored and dismissed. Uniquely, then, al-Samman's monograph establishes itself as a book intended to redress the gender imbalance in the study of Arab women authors, especially Syrian and Lebanese women authors in the diaspora. The value of al-Samman's investigation of the persistence of the collective trauma of waʾd burial, depicted in diaspora women's literature as personal and especially as political erasure in the context of Arab culture and politics, is indisputable. But it must also be noted that the scope of her examined corpus, albeit rich and consistent, fails to cover the important role played by Iraqi women writers in the diaspora and their many literary contributions in addressing the woes and trauma of successive Iraqi wars, and the politics of erasure in Iraqi society. This lacuna does not diminish the importance and merit of the book, particularly the novelty of its approach in focusing on the authors’ liberating and critical diasporic gaze on their homelands, free from censorship and essentialist concepts. In this regard, Anxiety of Erasure is a pioneering work on Arab women writers in diaspora. To my knowledge, it is the first book to address Arab women authorship in diaspora outside of outworn frameworks and from an angle different from the often-privileged Western feminist approaches.
Perhaps the most original contribution of this book is its analysis and discussion of the persistence, vestiges, and transformations of the trope of waʾd trauma in Arab culture through a literary corpus that spans almost a century, highlighting the intergenerational and collective latent trauma of waʾd burial. This investigation places the book at the intersection of cultural, literary, anthropological, and adab al-mahjar studies.
To explain and analyze the persistence and latency of waʾd trauma in the collective psyche of Arab women authors’ imaginary, the author makes excellent use of contemporary theories of trauma (Freud, Caruth, and Felman) and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She shows how the collective, lateral, and intergenerational trauma of waʾd burial is resurrected and manifested, despite temporal and spatial distances, in novels about personal and political suppression. Whether discussing female identity construction through a “mosaic autobiography”; the Lebanese civil war where the waʾd metaphor extends to all, women and men alike, city and country; the problems of Lebanese immigrants haunted in their exile by the trauma of the war, and torn between life in diaspora and the memory of home; or, examining the recent political disappointments and the perennial alienation of the Arab individual from society and state, the in-depth analysis of Anxiety of Erasure delves into the multiple modern recastings of the mawʾuda trope in Arab women's fiction, which unfolds today before our own eyes in the suffocation of the Syrian people, the torture of activists, and the burial of the city of Aleppo. It demonstrates how the authors’ imaginary is bent on the necessity and importance of excavating archives, resurrecting memories, recognizing trauma, and revealing how burial imagery and vestiges in Arab culture extend from women to men to cities, nations, ideas, dreams, literary archives, and aspirations for change and progress. The corpus of this extensive study extends to some of the most recent writings by women living in the diaspora, such as those by Samar Yazbak, the Syrian writer and activist who documented the first few months of the Syrian uprising, when waʾd trauma spread to an entire people and perhaps through a larger extension to the collective Arab population.
Throughout the eight chapters in Anxiety of Erasure, moving along a trajectory from the personal to the political, al-Samman compellingly argues that the recognition of pervasive traumatic memories heals women, tradition, and the nation. However, although she draws on the trope of Scheherazade as a cultural myth early on in the book, she does not give this trope the same level of treatment and attention she dedicates to the trope of waʾd. Nevertheless, in the book's postscript she recognizes Scheherazade as the literary mother of Arab women diaspora writers and emphasizes how her voice is spread beyond orality and saved from erasure through the writings of her granddaughters.
Anxiety of Erasure is a long-overdue fresh look at Arab women authors. It should be read as a methodology to help decipher contemporary Arab women's literature, spread their words, and increase their impact in a world where their voices can make a difference.
