Moneera Al-Ghadeer is the Fall 2014 Shawwaf Visiting Professor, and a participant in the November 2014 workshop on Saudi Women Writers organized by CMES Director William Granara and Professor Malika Zeghal. Her research focuses on Arabic and African American literatures, Francophone literature and postcolonial studies, literary theory and translation studies, and Arabic poetry and oral tradition. We spoke with her in October about her work and teaching.
Your first book, Desert Voices, was on Bedouin women's poetry. What got you interested in that topic?
The book is based on an earlier collection of poems called Sh’rat Min Al-Badiyah (Poets from the Desert), that were collected by a poet named Ibn Raddas. He traveled throughout the desert for a decade and collected these poems, but that collection remained excluded from academic and cultural studies. After I had looked at these poems, and began studying the dialect and understanding the implications—the aesthetic and also cultural and socio-historical significance—I realized that I had found this treasure that needed to be preserved and studied and shared, especially with the English speaking world. Ibn Raddas’ book was published in 1961, but it was just collecting dust.
In my study of this poetry, I gesture towards preserving women's oral poetic tradition, and also raise a critique addressing this exclusion. I wanted to first of all elucidate some of the misconceptions or beliefs about the feminine oral genre, and show also how the rhetorical force of Bedouin women's poetry is not only in its vernacular diction, meter, rhyme, all of the poetic traces and schemes, but also is intertwined with very theoretical questions about politics, gender, and language. I focused on the different thematic concerns that this poetry raised, whether it's love, desire, women's relation to technology.
When were these poems composed? Is the tradition of oral poetry ongoing today?
Yes, you find it in different Arabian deserts, in Jordan, Yemen, Syria. There are different genres of oral poetry, with different names, like muwashshaha in North Africa, zajal in Lebanon, and others. In terms of the Arabian Peninsula, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, they still compose this type of poetry, nabati. Different poets compose in Modern Standard Arabic but also write poetry in the oral Bedoiun nabati genre. Now they compose it and they publish it, where before it was recited. But also now they have programs on TV: there's a big competition, Million's Poet, on Abu Dhabi TV, in which there's a very interesting staging of this oral poetic tradition and competition among poets, with judges like on The Voice in the U.S. So it's very much alive, and you can see the interest in this genre in these different TV programs, and in the fact that it's been incorporated into music and song.
The question about the date of composition is complex, when it comes to oral tradition. It's a fascinating question that scholars have wrestled with since the Greeks on. In this particular collection, based on my examination of the dialects, the historical references in certain poems, proper names, places, the way I could differentiate in terms of historical periods of composition is before the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, and after the discovery of oil. Before the discovery of oil I noticed the dialect was very difficult Bedouin dialect, including references to historical and political events from the nineteenth century. And after the discovery of oil, the poems incorporate references to technological tools like cars, binoculars, trains, airplanes, among others. So women poets expressed their relationship to technology and modernity that was taking place in the Arabian peninsula, in the heart of the desert.
What sorts of theoretical questions are addressed?
I explored the question of translation, because it's a very important question to unfold. The poems are from different Bedouin dialects, so that raised a question about cultural translation and the politics of translation and gender. For instance, how to translate the sexual nuances within women's poetry from that dialect to English? How do we translate references to animals, weather, and certain cultural practices to English and maintain the significance and some of the important implications of these tropes? So I highlighted that, framing my discussion throughout the book within literary theory, translation studies, and feminist philosophy. Judith Butler is an interlocutor in the book, as is Jacques Derrida.
I argue in the book that we can read Arabic literature alongside what would be marked as Western theoretical models: psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post-colonial theory, and so on and so forth. It's not a question of these being Western methodologies, that they need to be completely confined to American, French, and German theoretical production. As a matter of fact there are moments of contact that took place earlier, like in the history of translation during the Abbasid era, when the Arabs translated and transmitted books of science and philosophy, which were then translated again into Latin and traveled to Europe. Then you have Andalus—that was another very important contact, in which translation and a cosmopolitan, if you wish, exchange was taking place. It's very hard to isolate traditions and try to create rigid borderlines, and I think I have been trying to show that in my work and in my teaching.
What does your current work focus on? You have a manuscript called “The Anxiety of the Foreign”?
Yes, it addresses the emergence of the foreign in Arabic and North African texts. I also discuss, especially in the first chapter, the American transformation of the image of the foreign and the ethnic other after 9/11. My argument suggests that the invocation of the foreign generates an explicit sense of anxiety and incomprehension. And that this is really separated from any relation to the aesthetic of the sublime, the cultural aesthetic that arose in European imperialist discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. If we look at the French, when they traveled in North Africa, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, or the Levant, and how they wrote about the Arab world—their representation of women, different cultures, paintings and so on and so forth—you will find some aesthetic component. It's a very complicated one, however it is present. After 9/11 what we have is the negative sublime—the representation is archaic, violent, and also you have all of these male faces dominating that representation.
When you talk about the foreign other from an Arab point of view is the other Western? Who is it?
According to the texts that I'm reading the foreign is not necessarily the encounter with the French, let's say, or the American—it's more complex than that. In Abdul Rahman Munif's Cities of Salt we see an encounter between the people of the oasis and these “foreigners,” who weren't classified or identified as Americans until probably 30 pages or so into the book. I call it a misencounter. For both groups there was no way of communicating with one another; there was miscommunication, misunderstanding, and almost all of them they were caught in this web of complex cultural and psychological apprehension, Each looked at the other as a site of apprehension and dread. And technology became another site of anxiety, so it's not only human to human contact, but we have other forms of foreignness in these texts.
You're teaching two Arabic literature courses this fall, one of which is taught in Arabic: “Invisible Societies in the Contemporary Arabic Novel.” Who are those invisible societies?
Usually they are marked by race, sometimes sexuality, gender: in one of the novels, by the Lebanese writer Huda Barakat, we have a Kurdish woman character who is given a very generous space in the narrative, and she actually narrates her story. Sometimes it's the question of disability, and we see how these authors problematize those with disability and how they are perceived in society. We also have different sects, different religious groups. And we go beyond just racial, religious, and ethnic markers, to think about what has been hidden in these novels. In the course we have to begin by theorizing invisibility and what is invisible, in literature, in these novels? We try then to focus on the literary construction of marginalized people and languages, on the tension between cosmopolitanism and localism, on tropes of invisibility, anonymity, namelessness, and marginality, and how they are being performed and put together in these texts. From a comparative perspective, we look at how these authors—Kuwaiti authors, Lebanese, Maghrebi, Saudi Arabian, among others—deal with similar or maybe different representation of these tropes. This class is also reading not only the literature, but also a number of theorists, not only from the West but also from the Arab world, which is really making it very interesting for the students. We are reading Abdul Al-Salam bin Abdul ‘Al-li, Abdelfattah Kilito, and Abdullah Al-Ghidhami, and Amin Maalouf, as well as Benedict Anderson, Lacan, Freud, Foucault, and Derrida.
For this class I also experimented with social media: after getting the agreement of the students we created a hashtag for the course, أدب_هارفارد#. So in addition to the other requirements for the course, their response papers, reading, and the blog, they are required to post two tweets per week in Arabic, using this hashtag, about the texts that we read, and the theoretical and philosophical works. I've also tweeted our hashtag, and we got retweeted by critics, people who have 200,000, 40,000, 20,000 followers, and I think we reached more than 400,000 people in total with the hashtag in a few days. A major critic we are reading, Al-Ghidhami, has around 226,000 followers. So that was fascinating to introduce to students that there is another medium that we can deploy in teaching. Social media creates this amazing platform to reach out to different communities—some of the authors we are reading follow the critics who retweeted us, so they know what we are reading. I've also had some of the authors in Skype conversations with the students, and they enjoyed speaking to them and asking questions about their novels.
And your other course, “The Racialized Other in the Arabian Peninsula Literature and Culture,” is in translation?
Yes, and it introduces the literature of the Arabian peninsula, because we don't really have in America courses that exclusively focus on this part of the world. Usually I say we have these texts “smuggled in” to literature courses. There is a surge of new writing in the Arabian peninsula, especially from Saudi Arabia. The publication of novels, short stories, and poetry, and the experimentation with different genres, is really noticeable, and they are winning literary prizes. It's very important to look at this literary production: we know just glimpses about the different countries in the Arabian Peninsula. The students are extremely fascinated by these authors, and are really engaged in discussing them, looking at different thematic concerns, and also reading them along with theoretical works.
The upcoming workshop on Saudi Women Writers, organized by Professors William Granara and Malika Zeghal, is also helping to bridge this gap—what will you be discussing there?
We have a rise of women novelists in Saudi Arabia. In the 50s we had probably one woman novelist. The first novel that was published in Saudi Arabia was in 1930, and women entered into the literary scene in the 50s, and then slowly started publishing as poets and short story writers and novelists. In the last few decades we see this rise of women writers and it's very important to study it, to look at their writing, what are they writing about, and examine the issues that they are exploring. They are contributing to the cultural and intellectual scene in Saudi Arabia.
You have been a fiction writer yourself—how did you come to that and to studying literature?
My interest in literature started early when I studied languages. I studied five or so languages when I was young, and that opened different frontiers, windows to the outside world. I majored in English literature and tried to write in English, but I didn't continue. I played with the poetic form, and then I started writing in Arabic, experimenting with the form of the short story. I worked as a literary editor at al-Riyadh newspaper when I was an undergrad, and that connected me with the literary world, and with language, and ignited that interest. I met a number of writers, from Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, and also all kinds of journalists and scholars coming from the U.S. and Europe. It was a moment of development and growth and coming of age. In graduate school at UC-Berkeley, I continued to write these experimental short stories, highly poetic, highly symbolic, which were published in newspapers and literary journals in Arabic in London, in Tunisia, in Riyadh. Then graduate school and working in academia took me on another path. After being a professor I stopped writing in Arabic, and writing fiction was put on hold.
It's very interesting, when I am tweeting in Arabic I feel as if I am returning to a relation with the Arabic poetic language. As if that writer who stopped, I don't know how many years ago, is coming back to the scene of writing in Arabic. I tweet about the cultural news, events in the world, but in certain moments I reflect on philosophical questions. As a writer in Arabic my sentence is concise and highly poetic, so it fits well. It's as if I return to a younger me through Twitter and through writing in Arabic.
—Interview by Johanna Bodnyk