The Wounds of War and Conflict in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writings from North Africa and the Middle East

The Wounds of War and Conflict in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writings from North Africa and the Middle East focuses on the writings of women authors from North Africa and the Middle East who open a critical and alternative imaginary of war and displacement in their literary production. Their voices underscore the capacity of the literary arts to project, critique, and complicate what has happened and what is still happening to women in these sites of violation because of war and continuing political instability, unchecked sexual trauma, health politics, and other insecurities. Emerging from a situation of urgency, The Wounds of War makes a much-needed postcolonial feminist literary and cultural intervention in traditional narratives of war and anti-war protest by filling the glaring gaps and omissions embedded in the MENA region’s ＂war stories＂ through its emphasis on the writings of women.

With its focus on North Africa and the Middle East, The Wounds of War establishes the legacy of Arab women’s anti-war resistance in the MENA region’s literary and cultural arts. It discusses how women survive war through gendered forms of resistance that highlight their strength, courage, and agency. This highly sensorial language is scarred by war wounds and poetic lament to reveal its expressivity in compelling texts that highlight the liminal spaces between loss and recovery, memory and amnesia, submission and resistance, and survival and death in delimiting war zones. Literature provides testimony and denunciation in the face of war’s wanton destructiveness by unveiling the bloodied synergies between biopower, war wounds, gender, and Arab women’s anti-war feminist resistance in prose, poetry, theatre, memoirs, and testimonial writing. Narrative enjambments underscore the ＂unrepresentable＂ dimensions of creativity that can articulate the horrors of war and conflict in Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine.

Brinda J. Mehta is the Germaine Thompson Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the award-winning author of five books on postcolonial women writers and creative resistance from the Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East, numerous articles on postcolonial feminist literature, and three co-edited journal issues. Her areas of specialization include postcolonial literature, transnational feminist thought, cultural studies, diaspora and migration studies.