The Supreme Council for Culture held its second women's conference last week. Amina Elbendary couldn't quite keep up Click to view caption Credit should be given to the Supreme Council for Culture for trying to narrow the focus of this year's round of the Women's conference. The first such activity, bringing together scholars from East and West, took place three years ago on the occasion of the centenary of the publication of Qasim Amin's Tahrir Al- Mar'ah (The Emancipation of Women). And not since the Qasim Amin conference have so many Arab women united under one roof. That, if nothing else, will remain an achievement. Rather than talk about "women" as such, the conference was intended to focus on creative women -- writers, artists, social scientists, and researchers -- and the issues that affect them. The topics under discussion, in panels and roundtables, ranged from women's creative writings and the impediments facing them, to women in Arab historiography, women in non-governmental organisations, women's contributions to the social sciences, the participation of women in the media, women's contribution to the plastic arts, and women in theatre and film. Evenings of testimonies and poetry readings provided opportunities for women to speak about their own experiences first hand. Inaugurated by Mrs Suzanne Mubarak on 26 October the five-day conference attracted some 130 participants from the Arab world and beyond. On the fringe of the main event were screenings of films by Arab women filmmakers of the 1990s, the majority of whom were Egyptians. Other activities included an evening of storytelling by the Women and Memory Forum, a concert by Inaya Gaber and an exhibition at the Palace of Arts showcasing paintings by Egyptian women. The image of Arab women's writing in the West provided the subject for one of the more interesting roundtables, opening up a variety of topics, on the translation of literature by Arab women in the West as well as on the works of Arab women who live and write in the West. The narrowness of the market for Arabic literature outside the Arab world was the focus of several participants. It was chaired by Sabry Hafez, professor of Arabic literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, who included amongst his points of debate for the roundtable the question of why Arabic literature has not spread beyond the expected borders and achieved the international renown that Latin American literature enjoys, for example. It was a question that, perhaps inevitably, remained unanswered. Isabella Camera talked about the frustrations of translating Arabic literature in general in Italy, including women's literature. As she explained, the market in Italy for such works is very limited, readers generally being more interested in exotic novels than in other genres. Camera drew attention to the fact that in Italy -- as in other Western European countries -- Arabic works in translation are available only at specialised bookstores. This is in contrast to books by Israeli authors which are more likely to be stocked by general bookstores. It is the Israeli authors who represent the Middle East in Europe. Camera talked about her own experience with a project to translate 50 auto- biographical novels which failed because of the perceived lack of a readership. Yet the period from 1988 saw a sharp increase in translation from Arabic to Italian in comparison to earlier decades of the 20th century. Jill Ramsay, a Swedish scholar, agreed with Camera that the readership acquainted with Arab women's writings is tiny, though there was some exposure to writings by Nawal Saadawi, Asia Djebar, Hanan El-Sheikh, Buthaina Al-Nasseri and Emily Nasrallah, for example. But, she added, Arabic is a distant language from Swedish and the number of translators from Arabic to Swedish can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The majority of Swedes get their ideas about Arab women not from creative writings but from interaction with the Arab community in Sweden, and as such what they are most familiar with are those issues related to the oppression of women. The situation is perhaps worse in the countries of the former Soviet Union, as Valeria Creptchinka explained. One side-effect of the difficult economic situation in Russia is that translation from Arabic into Russian has dwindled in the last 15 years. An ambitious project to translate the best 105 Arabic novels into Russian has so far resulted in the appearance of just 15. Another Russian scholar, Kovershina Natalia, added that translators in St Petersburg specialised in translating books from Arabic heritage while their counterparts in Moscow were more interested in contemporary literature. Even then, she added, many scholars have manuscripts locked up in drawers waiting for publishers. The market in the US is quite different, as Marilyn Booth pointed out. Increased interest in the Middle East means there are opportunities for publishing but only within confined parameters; publishers are in search of works that fit their preconceived ideas about Muslim and Arab women. One publisher specifically advised Booth that there is no market for postmodern Arab novels. Indeed, there is more interest in literature from a realist anthropological perspective and literature by women authors is expected to centre around women's issues and the status of women in the Arab world. Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim's contribution to the roundtable focused more on theory. It is a particular cultural theory which allowed for the deconstruction of the West, and discourse of the multiplicity of the West, thereby opening room for literature of other cultures to be transmitted to the West, she argued. These theories also shifted the focus from talk of "image" to talk of "voice." An image is inherently static, it defines the role of the photographed and asks him to pose for the photograph, that is why we're preoccupied with the question "how do they see us?" The limitations of the idea of the image led to calls by Third-World feminist writers to open the door to the voices of marginalised women. Recently, a shift in critical theory has increased interest in cultural interaction, the influence of Third World cultures on Western culture and vice versa. George Trabishi stressed the need to remember that the West is not monolithic, and neither is the East, and just as the tone of enmity towards the East has risen in the West, anti-Western sentiment has also increased in the East. There are writers from the East who have proven themselves in world literature -- he cited Amin Maalouf and Nawal El-Saadawi as examples. Trabishi also pointed out that writing was not the only field through which women became known in the West; television, he argued, played a crucial role in promoting women artists. Mohamed Barada stressed the multiplicity of the literature of the Arab world, the multiplicity of images and voices and the complexity of Arab reality embodied in the texts. All of this should be represented through translations. But once more the choice of what gets translated and the market for such commodities becomes an issue. There are different inscribed agendas in all societies, those producing the literature and those receiving it, a point Hoda El-Sadda stressed should be kept in mind. The current international crisis, while it presents challenges of animosity towards Arabs, also means there is an increased interest in this part of the world and this is an opportunity which might be capitalised on. Like Abdel-Hakim she stressed that Arab scholars engage in theoretical cultural discourse and not imprison themselves within the narrow limits of Middle Eastern Studies. One subject that the roundtable did not discuss sufficiently was the literature produced by Arab women writers in Western languages. A heated debate threatened to arise between Hafez and several participants when the chair argued that Ahdaf Soueif's novels were not part of contemporary Arab literature but of English literature, since the Anglophone Egyptian novelist writes in English. But there is a locus of cultural interaction that deserves more attention. Participants also agreed that Arabs should exert more effort in introducing their creative writers -- men and women -- to international readers. Despite the impressive numbers -- the conference included more than 40 different sessions -- there was something subdued about this round. Whether it is, as some critics have suggested, due to the abstention of many of the usual suspects in feminist discourse, or because of a more pervasive languor among the Arab intelligentsia, is not quite clear. The general theme of "The Arab Woman and Creativity" was not, however, formulated into a more workable problematic for discussion which gave leeway to the inevitable papers on women in x and women in y. Interestingly enough several participants discussed the works and problems facing women in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states -- regions typically ignored whenever talk of intellectual activities in the Arab world comes up. Papers such as those by Dalal Faisal, Fawzia Abdallah Abu Khaled, Isabella Camera and Jill Ramsey's point out that even the more subjugated sisters in these countries have managed to break the moulds that confined them and express themselves in various mediums, primarily through writing. If the purpose of the Arab Woman and Creativity Conference was to shed light on the fact that women contributed to all branches of knowledge and to document such contributions, then that was achieved, along with drawing attention to the obstacles that face women, as women and as "creators" -- a not-so-subtle variable that SCC Secretary-General Gaber Asfour highlighted in his opening speech. Related stories: Critical mass
