Hamdar’s The Female Suffering Body takes the reader on a comprehensive journey through the role and representation of the ill and disabled female body in Arabic literature from the 1950s to the 2000s, beginning with a comparison of male and female writers between 1950 and 2000, and then considering works written by women since 2000. This broadly genealogical approach helps a reader unfamiliar with the culture and politics of Middle Eastern and Arabic countries to follow wider social and cultural events, while Hamdar offers a thorough and insightful analysis of the literature.
To begin, the book explores how women’s bodies in illness or disability have been rarely represented in Middle Eastern and Arabic literature written by male writers, and how those few representations suffer due to what Hamdar identifies as Arab male writers’ difficulty approaching the bodies of women that do not live up to the cultural ideal, or fail to perform gender and sexuality adequately. The book discusses how ill and disabled female bodies, as written by men, undergo processes of stigma and othering, in literature but also in the cultures that literature reflects. The representations of illness and disability as the shameful result of deviance and sin, together with the redemption narrative used by male writers, are thoroughly analysed, but perhaps insufficiently criticised, and more could have been said about how such tropes are used in post-2000 men’s writing. Hamdar’s exploration of the representation of the ill or disabled female body as a metaphor for the state of the nation ties the critique closely to cultural shifts and socio-political events, and thoroughly argues for a representation of ill and disabled female bodies that are silenced and shamed.
The comparison of men and women writers is not as straightforward as expected, with a nuanced, well-developed (but easy to follow) argument developing. Hamdar engages with gender and the body – and representations of gender and the body – and picks up on how women writers’ representations both reproduce and struggle against patriarchal representations; illness and disability remain a metaphor, but one that is more engaged with the experience of disability itself. Hamdar’s understanding of illness and disability is perhaps not as nuanced as it could be – she tends to be largely uncritical of the positioning of both as tragedies – and it perhaps would have been better to have a greater critical engagement with this at the outset. However, her descriptions of and engagements with the texts are written in a way that enables the reader to engage critically from their own standpoint.
The post-2000 writing Hamdar considers is presented as a natural development from earlier work by women writers, with a more nuanced understanding of disability and illness, but also of the body-as-nation metaphor. Hamdar positions the move to a first-person narrative with the voice disabled and ill women as a key development in Arabic literature, moving disability and illness from private to public, from stigma to a more hopeful future, and her argument is persuasive. Again, she does not particularly engage with what suffering or disability or illness is, beyond a somewhat cursory engagement with cultural understandings; this lack of critical engagement is where the book falls a little flat, and is the biggest weakness of the work as a whole – but at the same time, a critique of cultural understandings of disability and illness as suffering is not the point of the work; in intending to offer a critical description of how the female suffering body has changed over the last 60 years of Arabic literature, Hamdar has undoubtedly succeeded.
Hamdar borrows only lightly from writing on disability; while she explains how and why she positions disability and illness together – and her explanation has merit, not just in terms of cultural understandings and a lack of definitions of health in Middle Eastern and Arab cultures – this positioning is not always comfortable for a reader with a more politicised view of disability, providing as it does a challenge to western understandings. The concept of ‘malaise,’ as introduced by Hamdar as a way of negotiating often unspecified illness/disability in the novels she explores, is a useful and interesting one, and enables a greater engagement with her subject than exploring the literary representations through a western medical or disability studies perspective. Hamdar’s positioning reflects that of the cultures her texts originate from, rather than a white western perspective; it is critical without being dismissive, and appreciative without being fetishising. This is important, particularly when considering literature written while resisting colonisation and imperialism, and literature that engages with discourses of nations, and bodies as metaphors for the state.
Overall, The Female Suffering Body is an interesting text that presents a comprehensive genealogy of representations of ill and disabled women in modern Arabic literature. This book will be of interest to those exploring non-western concepts of disability, health and illness, and also to those engaging with literary representations of disability and illness.
Edge Hill University, UK
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© 2015, Emma Sheppard
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1066977