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An Arab Woman Poet as a Crossover Artist?Reconsidering the Ambivalent Legacy of

Al-Khansaʾ

Michelle HartmanMcGill University

Al-Khansaʾ is celebrated as the first woman poet in Arabic and con-sistently upheld as an example of an accomplished and creative Arab, Muslim woman. Born in pre-Islamic Arabia, al-Khansaʾ ’s composition of poetry is believed to have spanned the period of the coming of Islam, and she is often regarded as one of its earliest converts. Perhaps the best-known female figure of the seventh century, her legacy includes not only Arab women poets but extends to other Arab women writers and beyond. As she is considered one of the finest poets of the period, a number of diwans, or poetry compilations, have been devoted to her work, and a host of stories, anecdotes, and critical studies form the backbone of the strong personality attributed to this figure throughout history. From ancient, through classi-cal, until modern times, al-Khansaʾ ’s work has been continuously studied by scholars writing in Arabic; her poetry is still the subject of critical inquiry today.1 Al-Khansaʾ ’s importance and resonance is not limited to esoteric or “high” literary circles in the Arab world that would demand a deep understanding of her copious poetic output. Indeed, in Arabic the name al-Khansaʾ evokes a range of symbolic meanings linked not only to her poetry but also, more importantly, to her role as an exemplary Arab and Muslim woman: her name adorns schools, hospitals, and even a somewhat notorious “jihadist” magazine.2

In English, of course, al-Khansaʾ is hardly a household name. A survey of English-language scholarship on Arabic women’s literature, however, reveals that this poet is mentioned in nearly every work on Arab women writers published in English.3 For example, an extensive survey recently published by the American University in Cairo Press, Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873-1999, opens with a reference to al-Khansaʾ as a point of origin.4 Not only academic works in English underline her importance. In twin articles published in Ms. Magazine and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Bouthaina Shaaban invokes al-Khansaʾ as a literary foremother to emphasize the long legacy of women writers in Arabic to readers unaware of this past.5

Perhaps even more interesting is the large number of scholarly works

16 tSWL, 30.1, Spring 2011

published about Arab and Muslim women in a wide range of non-literary fields that, while not discussing her at any length, refer to al-Khansaʾ in a variety of ways to activate some of her potent symbolic meanings.6 Further, a number of general literary anthologies of “world literature,” “women’s literature,” and other wide-ranging categories include entries on al-Khansaʾ and translations of her poetry.7 All of these examples demonstrate the metonymic power that al-Khansaʾ has to represent Arab women in a wide range of locations in English-language scholarship.

It is safe to claim therefore that al-Khansaʾ is widely referred to and upheld as an exemplary Arab woman poet in English-language scholarship and knowledge production about Arab women writers. This status reflects her position in Arabic, but as this article will argue, diverges from it in important ways, producing an extremely different figure in English transla-tion. The near absence of serious studies of her work in English,8 coupled with the frequent invocations of her name, leads to a series of provocative questions: How does a poet whose oeuvre is limited to a large but rather homogenous collection of poetry—nearly all of it marathi (elegies) about one man fallen in battle—manage to become such a frequently cited repre-sentative of an Arab women writer to an English-language audience? How then does a little-translated and rarely studied poet from seventh-century Arabia manage to cross over as an exemplary figure in scholarship on Arab and Muslim women in general? Why is her poetry included in general anthologies of literature from around the world as one of extremely few examples of creative work by Arab authors across time and space?

This study frames the questions above in the context of the reception of al-Khansaʾ as an exemplary and exceptional Arab woman poet. I argue that this reception is inseparable from larger issues related to the transfor-mations that she and her poetry undergo in translation into English. In turn, I propose that this situation is not unique to al-Khansaʾ but rather that her transformation through translation itself exemplifies a process that Arab women artists who have successfully crossed over into English have undergone. Reception studies of other Arab women poets and writers have demonstrated this process at work in relation to the dynamics of translat-ing, editing, publishing, and teaching Arab women writers in English.9 One particularly pertinent case is Nawal El Saadawi, consistently portrayed in the West as a lone feminist crusader for women’s rights in the Middle East. Amal Amireh’s reception study of Saadawi has demonstrated in great detail how translation into English has changed her work, its messages, and her image. Mohja Kahf has similarly shown how the translation and editing of the memoirs of early feminist Huda Shaarawi significantly change this work, emphasizing her estrangement from her society and her difference from other women. My study engages and builds upon these previous stud-ies that demonstrate how particular images of the Arab woman are con-

17

structed through translation into English, especially in marking successful, creative women as somehow exceptions to the Orientalist stereotype of the oppressed woman. The collusion of white, liberal feminist ideology, the racialization of Arab women marked as Other, and the lingering legacies of Orientalism are all at play in producing particular images of Arab women in English translation.

In this study, I will specifically concentrate on some of the ways in which essentialized notions of gendered and racialized categories intersecting with Orientalist ideas underlie the translation and reception of al-Khansaʾ and her poetry in English. I will further suggest some of the ways that com-plex intersections of assumptions about the category “Arab woman poet” produce these essentialized notions. In close analyses of the texts written about al-Khansaʾ , I will show how her English-language reception rein-forces the very stereotypes and misconceptions that build these complex intersections. In order to do this, I will probe the issues of problematic (mis)translations, the understanding of a poet as exemplary and excep-tional, and stereotypes about Arabs, women, and Arab women. I will show how—similarly to other exemplary and exceptional Arab women writers and feminists who have been translated into English, such as Saadawi and Shaarawi—the major problem in the process through which al-Khansaʾ travels into English translation is that she is divested of contexts, which might provide different ways of understanding her and her work.

In a study comparing al-Khansaʾ to contemporary Palestinian elegist Fadwa Tuqan, Terri DeYoung proposes that “all modern Arab women writers would have found it difficult to avoid confronting at one time or another the ambivalent legacy of al-Khansaʾ .”10 Part of what DeYoung is pointing to here is how al-Khansaʾ is so lionized as to have become a figure that is beyond discussion and critique. Her stature is connected to her specific poetic output—mourning poems for her dead brothers—and the implications of Arab women’s verse being lauded when its primary function is celebrating death on the battlefield. The ambivalent legacy of this celebration of war and death that DeYoung emphasizes in the case of Tuqan is clearly linked to a range of contemporary issues in a time of ongoing war and occupation. She points out that if women are limited to producing mourning poetry celebrating men, they cannot work with other modes of creative expression. Here, I would add that readers of English who wish to read and understand al-Khansaʾ confront this same question from their own positionality in a world where wars are still being waged in Arab countries and also confront an additional, ambivalent legacy. The transla-tions and representations of al-Khansaʾ and her work reveal a number of problems central to understanding the politics of translation of women writers from Arabic to English. As I highlighted above, al-Khansaʾ is not alone in representing problematic translation politics and practices. The

18 tSWL, 30.1, Spring 2011

discourse around Arab women in English and the exigencies of publishing and marketing to an English-reading audience shape not only what works are chosen for translation but also how works are translated, marketed, and promoted as “representative.” This study will argue that examining al-Khansaʾ ’s reception in English can help us to think through a number of issues related to the interest in and ambivalence around her. It begins with the issue of translation and representation, pointing out ways in which al-Khansaʾ has been transformed in the English-language environment. This discussion will lead to a more detailed analysis of her as a literary figure who is shown to be both an exception to her culture and a typical woman. Here, I will probe how there is a profound difference between thinking about an individual poet and her poems and understanding the figure of a poet that has been constructed and seen through the lenses of many generations. Finally, I will give some suggestions of how contextual-izations, particularly in relation to genre, can help us to understand better how al-Khansaʾ manages to be a crossover artist in English translation, while reflecting on what that means for knowledge production about Arab women in English.

The (Mis)translation and Representation of al-Khansaʾ , Literary Foremother

Nowhere is the construction of al-Khansaʾ as an exemplary figure of Arab, Muslim women more evident than in the 1977 volume, Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak, edited by Elizabeth Fernea and Basima Bezirgan.11 Al-Khansaʾ ’s status as a towering role model for Arab women is established in its opening pages by including her as the first of twenty-three entries of Muslim women from the Middle East ranging from poets, mystics, and singers to activists, novelists, and everyday women. This anthology is one of the first to claim to “give voice” to Muslim women from the Middle East by compiling an anthology of their stories and writings in English (p. xx). Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak is typical of other works that use al-Khansaʾ as a figure who lends authority to the notion that there is a long history of active and productive Arab women. I dwell upon this par-ticular anthology’s inclusion of al-Khansaʾ for two reasons. One is because it exemplifies many other mentions of and shorter entries on al-Khansaʾ in English-language anthologies and studies of her. The second reason is because this anthology’s translation and representation of al-Khansaʾ demonstrate the ways in which a well-meaning feminist project to counter the silence of Muslim, Middle Eastern women in English reproduces prob-lematic Orientalist imagery about this early poet. It thus participates in the production of a larger discourse around creative, literary women that activates their exceptionality and uniqueness.

By placing al-Khansaʾ ’s section first, Middle Eastern Muslim Women

19

Speak clearly accents her role as a literary foremother of later Arab, Muslim women. The kind of discourse produced and reproduced about her here reveals a great deal about how Arab, Muslim women are represented in this particular work, which itself reflects problems of trying to speak for women and give them a “representative” voice that is highly selective and limited. This selectivity is first evident in the way in which the entry on al-Khansaʾ is presented. It labels her simply a “poet of Early Islam,” gives a brief biographical account of the poet, and supplies an English translation of one of the famous poems that she wrote upon the death of her brother Sakhr (p. 3). On the page facing the text is a black and white reproduc-tion of a photo of a completely covered, veiled woman sitting atop a camel alone in a barren desert; it is labeled as being in the Empty Quarter. The image is striking for a number of reasons. A woman covered from head to toe in black sitting on a camel under the blazing desert sun is the stereo-typed image of the backward, oppressed Arab woman par excellence. As an accompaniment to what is described as accomplished poetry by a great poet, the image makes little sense. The picture, of course, could not be of al-Khansaʾ herself, and thus a nameless, faceless woman sitting on a camel is used to represent what she might have looked like or invoke the setting in which she is presumed to have lived. The composition of the photo with the lone woman silhouetted against the sand and its location in the Empty Quarter reinforces further the idea of the harshness of desert life. Even more importantly, though, it accents the notion that al-Khansaʾ was somehow a solitary female figure within this society—perhaps because she lost her brother on the battlefield but also alone as an example of a creative woman and exceptional poet. The idea that al-Khansaʾ was a great poet but singular in her achievements once again echoes the representation of other Arab women in this anthology and elsewhere. They are set apart from their societies rather than being depicted as creative women integrated into and working within their societies.

The biographical sketch presented by Fernea and Bezirgan reproduces quite a number of the most-frequently cited stories about al-Khansaʾ that reinforce this exceptionalism. This section cites two references—one in Arabic and one in English—upon which the information presented is based: Qadriyah Husayn’s Shahirat Nisaʾ fi al-ʿAlam al-Islami (Women poets in the Islamic world) and Reynold A. Nicholson’s A Literary History of the Arabs.12 These scholarly works lend a certain historical authority to the account of al-Khansaʾ presented here. For example, Fernea and Bezirgan cite her full name as Tumadir bint ʿAmru al-Harith bin al-Sharid, a fact seemingly agreed upon by almost all references to al-Khansaʾ in English (p. 3). They go on to report that she was born in Arabia in the period before the rise of the Prophet Muhammad and later accepted his message, becoming a Muslim. The entry links the deaths of her brothers in “tribal

20 tSWL, 30.1, Spring 2011

skirmishes” to her conversion to Islam and cites her sorrow that they did not live long enough to profess the faith (p. 3). It also reports that she refused to marry until she found a husband of her choice, that she outlived her three husbands, and that she mourned the death of her sons in battle by considering it an honor that they died for Islam. Fernea and Bezirgan’s narrative also includes the disputed, but frequently repeated, idea that the Prophet Muhammad himself was fond of her poetry and asked her to recite for him. In addition to these stories that are still invoked today to present al-Khansaʾ as a particularly Islamic role model for Muslim women, other stories relate her ability as a poet and her personality as a feisty woman willing to speak her mind. They tell of how she often participated in the open-air contests where poets would recite their works and be judged. The story goes that after reciting a line that was grudgingly accepted by a male competitor who said, “We’ve never seen a better woman poet than you,” al-Khansaʾ snapped back with, “Don’t you want to say that I am the best poet, male or female?” (p. 4).

These stories and anecdotes about al-Khansaʾ are appealing and fre-quently reproduced. Their reproduction in the anthology exemplifies how they are used in English-language works almost exclusively to show al-Khansaʾ as different from other women rather than, for example, to show her as the best of many women poets or part of a thriving women’s poetry scene. They do not show how she excelled from within her social context but rather imply that she somehow deviated or was estranged from it.13 This distancing of al-Khansaʾ from her context in this anthology as in so many others, I would argue, again demonstrates how the construction of what it is to be a woman reflects clearly the concerns of liberal feminists in Western contexts who have absorbed a racialized, Orientalist legacy that depicts al-Khansaʾ as a role model who is the exception to the rule in the Arab world, rather than trying to understand her within her context.

A brief commentary just on the sobriquet al-Khansaʾ and how the name translates her into English highlights the kinds of problems with her rep-resentation as an exemplary Arab woman—particularly how certain ideals are projected from the present to the past and from English-language envi-ronments onto Arabic-language works. Most English-language studies of al-Khansaʾ translate and try to explain her nickname. None contextualize it by noting that many other poets, male and female, are referred to by a full name and a nickname or what these nicknames might signify. Typically the names are simply reproduced, at times with translations or explanations given. Fernea and Bezirgan explain Al-Khansaʾ ’s nickname in passing, stating, “She was considered talented and beautiful despite the slightly turned nose which gave her the nickname of al-Khansaʾ ” (p. 3). Many English-language accounts translate the name directly as “snub-nosed,” leaving its interpretation alone.14 A standard Arabic-English dictionary

21

gives “pugnosed” as the definition of the word “al-khansaʾ ,” the feminine form of “akhnas.”15

What neither the dictionary definition nor Fernea and Bezirgan’s assur-ance that she was considered beautiful “despite” her nose captures are the more complex layers of meaning that such a nose has in the Arabic literary imagination. In English, almost any mention of a nose in relation to one’s beauty is considered negative, but the same is not true in Arabic. In the case of a pug nose, in fact, the animal conjured up is not the dog of the same breed but rather the gazelle. Rather than an upturned “pug” nose, the Arabic word al-khansaʾ is a feminine form referring metonymically to the flat-nosed animal, the gazelle—thereby necessitating a completely differ-ent interpretation of al-Khansaʾ ’s name.16 A nickname that unequivocally emphasizes the poet’s grace and beauty in Arabic, when translated into English, comes to suggest that she succeeded “despite” her appearance.

The relevance of a woman’s physical appearance to her poetry and her role as a literary figure is called into question by this fixation on al-Khansaʾ ’s nose. Such a connection between a creative woman’s beauty or rather lack of beauty is one that is powerful in English-language envi-ronments—George Eliot being a case in point. However, the same history does not apply to Arab women writers. Through the (mis)translation of her nickname, this poet is further removed from the very contexts that can help us to understand her and her poetry. Al-Khansaʾ ’s name in Arabic draws upon (stereo)typical tropes of female beauty. As the gazelle, she is able to be a poet and be creative but at the same time embody qualities of femi-nine beauty. Her exceptionality as a creative artist does not necessitate her standing out somehow from other women as “ugly” or “masculine.” In this way, in Arabic, her nickname makes her more, rather than less, integrated into mainstream understandings of women. In English translation, by contrast, al-Khansaʾ achieves this status not in relation to beauty, but the reverse. Orientalist, “feminist” assumptions about a successful Arab woman standing opposed to her society here are reinforced in the (mis)translation of her name. Her “ugliness” in English matches her exceptionality as a poet.

The Poet as Exceptional Woman / The Poet as (Stereo)Typical Woman

The role of al-Khansaʾ as an exception to her culture—as a poet who succeeds “despite” her looks, her background, and her situation rather than in concert with it—is reinforced throughout other kinds of anthologies that include her poetry. Though Arab women tend not to be well repre-sented in collections of women’s writing, al-Khansaʾ does appear in several. I read these anthologies, in conjunction with academic scholarship on al-Khansaʾ , as producing the discourse around her in English. Anthologies operate in genre-specific ways, and various anthologies participate in this

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discourse differently; for example, Fernea and Bezirgan’s volume is meant largely for teaching, and the more general works, which I will discuss below, are also aimed at a wide-ranging audience. Though I analyze these works together, it is crucial to underline how they each produce a version of al-Khansaʾ in ways that suit their own genre-specific needs.

The complexities of al-Khansaʾ ’s position within anthologies that emphasize personal identification, ethnicity, language, nationalism, and so on are accented in works that span huge time periods, such as A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, edited by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone.17 In this collection, al-Khansaʾ is one of four women who are categorized under the rubric “Arabic” in an anthology that brings together more than three hundred poets writing in different languages from all over the world (pp. 92-97). Laila Akhyaliyya and al-Khansaʾ are both further labeled under the category “Arabia,” while the other two poets writing in Arabic are labeled as coming from “Iraq”; all are placed within the temporal section devoted to antiquity (p. ix). Though half of the book is devoted to the modern period (the other half to antiquity), no modern women poets writing in Arabic are noted. Those who might be labeled as “Arabs” are rather identified under the (colonial) language “French” and then further by a nation—Andrée Chedid is included as “Egyptian,” and Nadia Tuéni and Vénus Khoury-Ghata are labeled as “Lebanese” in the modern section (p. xiv).18

Similarly, The Penguin Book of Women Poets, edited by Carol Cosman, Joan Keefe, and Kathleen Weaver, includes al-Khansaʾ as the one “classi-cal” example of four Arab women among more than two hundred poets; the other three are the “modern” writers Fadwa Tuqan, Nadia Tuéni, and Samar Attar.19 The Penguin anthology makes clear that al-Khansaʾ is included not only to represent her society, but also because of her “unusual” life, by referencing anecdotes such as her refusal to marry an old man and her presence as part of a deputation to meet the Prophet Muhammad (p. 65). Once again, her representative function in these texts serves the inter-ests of deriving factual information about her as a figure who is unusual and exemplary. Through the choice of information presented, the anthologies give precedence to understanding Arab society and women’s roles in it over a literary or aesthetic reading of al-Khansaʾ ’s poetry, or even a reading of the poetry in relation to its literary and institutional context. The antholo-gies insist on holding up al-Khansaʾ as exceptional within her culture and as resisting rather than working within it.

In conjunction with representing al-Khansaʾ as an exception, another major English-language discourse translates her as a typical, or indeed stereotypical, woman. This reading emphasizes her female identity as a woman poet and an Arab woman poet in particular. It is clear in a number of examples that critics and anthologists draw on a (stereo)typical recep-

23

tion of women’s writing that posits women as emotional. This type of proposition has a broad-based, cross-cultural, and transnational appeal, as Marilyn Booth has pointed out in relation to Somaya Ramadan’s recep-tion in Egypt.20 The focus on delving into al-Khansaʾ ’s motivations for producing poetry calls attention to a contemporary need for both a unitary authorial figure and the desire to approach women’s writing as an (auto)biographical and a sociological tool to understand women’s lives. In the case of an Arab woman poet, these are only exacerbated by the traditional approach of English-language study that mines Arabic literary texts for “facts” and the need for an exemplary Arab woman to be the exception that proves the rule of Arab female oppression.21

This impetus to understand Arab women’s poetry sociologically comes to light particularly in the discussion of al-Khansaʾ as an elegist. Like other female poets, al-Khansaʾ mainly composed marathi, and most of her poems were composed for her male relatives fallen in battle. Both male and female poets in jahili (pre-Islamic) Arabia composed marathi—though few women in classical times composed poetry in other genres.22 One particularly nota-ble feature of her oeuvre in comparison to that of other poets, especially women poets, is that it is extensive. A large amount is extant, and a full diwan of her works containing at least fifty-five poems was already collected in 620 CE. Though she dedicated several poems to her brother Muʿ awiya, the vast majority of her lamentations were devoted to her brother Sakhr. No Arabic or English source on al-Khansaʾ fails to highlight this particular fact—all studies of and references to al-Khansaʾ ’s poetry mention her love for her brother Sakhr. The evidence for this love is the poetry itself, though some—including Oxford Professor of Arabic and specialist in classical poetry Alan Jones—have rather ungenerously suggested that this is because his name was relatively easy to rhyme.23

Indeed Jones, one of the few scholars who has produced a serious study of al-Khansaʾ ’s poetry in English, follows this line of reasoning further when he goes so far as to suggest that her copious production in the rithaʾ (elegiac poetry) genre was a product of her overflowing emotions. His readings of the intricacies of her poetic language are deep and thoughtful, providing the student of the language of pre-Islamic poetry a great service. His explanatory device for her poetic genius is less so; he claims, “Her obsession with lament was all-engulfing—unhinged does not seem too strong a description of her personality” (p. 89). Poet and scholar of Islamic studies, Eric Ormsby echoes Jones by citing this quotation in full when describing her in his essay “Questions for Stones.”24 “Unhinged” is an espe-cially strong and loaded word, conjuring up centuries of representations of women writers as subject to gendered “hysteria.” Even if their language is less dramatic, most Arabic and English sources concur with Jones that rithaʾ

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is a particularly appropriate genre for women because women are by nature emotional and thus writing poems that express these emotions suits them.

Introducing al-Khansaʾ in Arabic and Persian Poems in English, Omar S. Pound echoes this emotional explanation of her motivation to write poetry in his brief biography of the poet: “Al-Khansaʾ refused to be consoled and one feels that she did not want to be . . . . Her emotional sincerity and power of lamentation come through 1,300 years later. Arabs still read her for her simplicity of language and integrity.”25 Connecting a woman’s poetic or literary output not only to her looks but also to her feelings is far from unprecedented in discussing women’s literature and is by no means unique to the study of Arab women writers. In any individual case of a woman writer, such connections may or may not be true. Perhaps al-Khansaʾ was deeply disturbed by her brother’s death. However, with little reliable biographical information about al-Khansaʾ dating from the period, the information seems at best speculative and almost certainly misogynistic. A close look at Pound’s logic, moreover, is crucial for understanding the transformation of al-Khansaʾ and her poetry in English. Nowhere will you find “Arabs” reading al-Khansaʾ for what one might call in English her “simplicity of language.” Al-Khansaʾ ’s use of language, like that of all poets considered great in the Arabic literary tradition, is why she is respected as a poet, and most would agree that her works use a language that is far from simple. Indeed, though the Encyclopedia of Islam does fall somewhat into the same trap of describing her poetry with the gendered adjective “tender” (though to be fair, it also uses “intense” and “violent”—words that activate stereotypes about Arabs), its entry on al-Khansaʾ points out that her poetry was renowned because of the way she reinvigorated the genre with new expressions as well as stylistic and metrical embellishments.26 Even more problematic in some ways is the underlying assumption by Pound that “emotional sincerity” is what gives these poems their power rather than, for example, her command of the literary form, evocative metaphors, or genius with language. Pound echoes Jones, moreover, in his attribution to al-Khansaʾ of an almost pathological need to suffer when he claims that she seems not to want “to be consoled” when faced with the horror of death.

This understanding of al-Khansaʾ ’s emotionality and love for her brother as a gendered weakness that produces poetry is reversed but essentially held intact in anthologies of women’s writings that include al-Khansaʾ . Rather than undermining the assumption that her writing is connected to her emotionality as a woman, these works still locate emotions as the source of her poetry but also propose her emotions as a source of strength and inspira-tion. For example, the entry on al-Khansaʾ in Cosman, Keefe, and Weaver’s The Penguin Book of Women Poets states that it was “her grief at the death of her two brothers, which inspired her to write elegies” (p. 65). Here, al-Khansaʾ is praised for her resilience upon the loss of a loved one because

25

of her ability to turn her feelings into great art. In this line of argument, al-Khansaʾ wrote elegies commemorating her brother not out of emotional weakness but out of emotional strength. A similar characterization in her entry in Barnstone and Barnstone’s A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now characterizes al-Khansaʾ as “a fiercely strong poet—earthy, wildly imaginative” (p. 92).

Jones, Ormsby, Pound, Barnstone and Barnstone, and Cosman, Keefe, and Weaver all understand al-Khansaʾ ’s poetry through her personal char-acteristics, primarily her attachment to her brothers; her poems are meant to represent her sensitivity, imagination, and emotions. This gendered representation of al-Khansaʾ and her poetry are reinforced by cultural stereotypes of Arab women, and this representation can perhaps be identi-fied as the major “scandal” of translating al-Khansaʾ , to borrow Lawrence Venuti’s term.27 One of the effects of using the example of al-Khansaʾ ’s elegies for her brother as a singular contribution (or one of only two or three contributions) by an Arab woman in a general anthology of women’s literature is to underline the notion that Arab women are overly attached to their brothers. By including decontextualized poems of lament for a dead brother, anthologies may inadvertently use al-Khansaʾ ’s poems to support the notion that Arab women do not have minds of their own but were (and are) held in the sway of oppressive Arab men. This decontextualization closely echoes Kahf’s analysis in “Packaging ‘Huda’” of the transforma-tion of feminist Huda Shaarawi’s memoirs into English; her study details how Arab men are removed from positive roles and influences in this text through the translation process that changed Mudhakkirati (My Memoirs) to Harem Years. She proposes that Arab women are allowed to play three roles in English translation—victim, escapee, and pawn.28 The idea that Arab women are pawns of Arab men, that they praise their brothers and fathers—allegedly the men who oppress them—because they lack the freedom or knowledge to do otherwise is one of a series of destructive stereotypes about Arab women that persists to this day. A more thorough and complex contextualization of gender norms, roles, and interactions in relation to Arabic poetry is thus needed to make sense of why al-Khansaʾ would indeed write so many poems for her brother and how her oeuvre can be understood in relation to other works of her era.

The emphasis on ancient poetry by anthologies of women’s literature and Arabic literature means that the images presented of “Arab” or “Arabian” society are often distorted. Women’s writing of this time is limited largely to rithaʾ , which is rooted in the context of its time and subjects its composer to the generic demand of praising men’s exploits in war. Including so much of this poetry in anthologies with little contextualization thereby reinforces twentieth- and twenty-first-century stereotypes about Arabs being obsessed with war and death. Al-Khansaʾ allows us to probe gendered ways of typing

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Arabs—as emotional and tender, as well as violent and intense. In the case of Arab writers who are already misrepresented in Western media and else-where, this stereotyping serves to reinforce a notion that Arabs care little for human life and even celebrate death. Indeed this article is a critique of the lionization of al-Khansaʾ in the Arab context as well, particularly by women critics. Nuha Samara has questioned the glorification of al-Khansaʾ as a poet celebrating death in the context of the 1990 war against Iraq.29

Gender, Genre, and Mourning a Brother

The gendered understandings of al-Khansaʾ rooted alternatively in sexist and libratory assumptions about the connection between poet and poem inform her reception in English. Moreover, assumptions about authorship in our own era deeply inform this reception. This is true of course in both the Arabic and English reception environments. The additional layers present in English translation, however, reveal a different set of issues, all of which rely on identifying the poet’s personal motivations for composing poetry. This particular approach reveals less about the poetry or figure of al-Khansaʾ than it does about the critical world that is reading them. It also obscures the crucial importance of genre to understanding al-Khansaʾ ’s literary production. The lack of contextualization of her generic produc-tion—the writing of elegies for a male family member—means that her poems in English translation, which will largely be understood in relation to content and not form, read simply as laments for a dead man and his heroic feats in battle. Stripped of additional nuances, such poems mean little to a contemporary English-reading audience, but they do reinforce a number of stereotypes.

It is not important here whether or not al-Khansaʾ was devastated and/or inspired by her brother’s death. We do not even know that the poetry attributed to a woman by this name was even composed by one, discrete historical person. Indeed the person who is identified as the historical figure al-Khansaʾ is thought to have lived sometime around 600-670 CE (or perhaps later), and her literary production thus dates to a period and a place about which we know very little today. What I am suggesting here is that it can be problematic to read poetry from this period as providing direct, factual source material about life in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia. Reproducing information about this poetry in English translation, let alone extrapolating from it knowledge about the personality and life of the people who shaped it, must be treated with caution, acknowledging the difficulties involved in reading these literary artifacts and the nuances required.

The difficulties and need for nuances are only reinforced when read-ing these works in translation. Not only is pre-Islamic poetry generally

27

extremely difficult to understand in Arabic, many of its peculiar beauties seem to be impossible to convey in English. Scholars of translation have indeed singled out this poetry as particularly challenging to move into English, most notably because of its different aesthetic.30 Adding to the difficulties of translation of Arabic literary texts into English in general, the unfamiliar aesthetic and challenging lexicon of pre-Islamic poetry present further problems for translation and publication in English.31

Poetry in general is considerably less translated than prose—ancient poetry much less frequently than modern poetry. It is even rarer to find good translations intended for non-specialist readers of this poetry published in accessible volumes, with the stunning exception of Michael Sells’s work, especially Desert Tracings. Only a handful of scholars have reevaluated this poetic corpus and worked to contextualize it without ignoring its literary brilliance.32 Given that female poets face an additional burden of misrep-resentation and stereotypes over male poets, the reception environment for al-Khansaʾ is from the outset fraught with difficulty. Within this larger context of pre-Islamic poetry, it is then instructive to look at the specific genre of al-Khansaʾ ’s composition, rithaʾ —itself one not always immedi-ately accessible to a non-Arabic speaking audience. Indeed elegy is not a poetic genre that speaks easily to an English-language reader today, but a fuller understanding of rithaʾ helps to provide a textured understanding of al-Khansaʾ ’s production.

One crucial element missing in the dynamics of al-Khansaʾ ’s reception in English is an understanding of the role of rithaʾ in her society. Such a generic context can thicken the understanding of al-Khansaʾ and her production, even for a reader limited to understanding al-Khansaʾ through the English language. Genre is always a key to understanding the interplay of literary works in their social, institutional, and other contexts. In the case of less well-known works, authors, periods, languages, and so on, a richly textured understanding of the genre of literary production can be the difference between a deep reading of the work and one that remains largely superficial. Understanding genre, however, does not simply mean to categorize works or see them in relation to others of the same category—merely to read al-Khansaʾ ’s work alongside other elegies, for example, and compare them formally.

By genre here, I mean to emphasize not merely form strictly speak-ing—that is, the stylistic pieces that are put together to make a complete puzzle—but rather the larger set of literary, social, and other circumstances surrounding the work. Indeed, literary genres unite form and content in typical constructs that draw their meaning from forms of interaction in specific social settings.33 The expectations and role of a particular genre of work in its social setting are what gives it meaning. It is therefore crucial to avoid the temptation to focus merely on the aesthetic and formal qualities

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of a poem to see it as an example of rithaʾ . What is important is to under-stand the larger implications of the rithaʾ genre, particularly in its gendered meanings and function in society. Such a deeper investigation and contex-tualization of the genre reveals similar dilemmas of representation in the politics of its translation from Arabic into English.

A different, more thickly textured reading of al-Khansaʾ ’s poetic output suggests that it should be understood through the intersection of gender, genre, and ritualized mourning. Rather than reading al-Khansaʾ and her poetic output as extraordinary, part of an unusual life, or due to the despair and/or inspiration of a sister who loved her brothers fallen in battle, I will highlight the ways in which rithaʾ functioned as a genre in her social setting in relation to women’s role in producing it. The strictures and boundaries of conventional poetry not only limit the bounds of creative production but also must be used to interpret it. In the case of al-Khansaʾ , such a contex-tualization allows a rather different literary figure to emerge.

What then are the characteristics and institutional implications of the rithaʾ genre that can give us additional insight into the poetry of al-Khansaʾ , allowing us to revise the English-language discourse about her? To begin with, as the scholar of classical Arabic poetry Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych has argued more than once, evidence suggests that rithaʾ was likely composed and recited in pre-Islamic Arabia as part of a ritual of mourning.34 Stetkevych’s analysis of gender and rithaʾ in her important study of classical poetry The Mute Immortals Speak, for example, under-stands women’s roles in the mourning process as linked to their produc-tion of this genre (pp. 162-65). DeYoung also underlines this idea in her insightful analysis of al-Khansaʾ , with a focus on the role of literature as a social institution in pre-Islamic Arabia.35 Even the editors of The Penguin Book of Women Poets mention this idea in passing—“Al-Khansaʾ ’s role as a poet was primarily that of ritual mourner—a role traditionally belonging to women” (p. 65). Though they call attention to the gendered nature of this role, they do not explicitly link it to the production of elegies by women writers, as do DeYoung and Stetkevych. More recently, in “Qasida, Marthiya, and Différance,” Marlé Hammond has warned against the exag-geration of the social limitations placed on women’s poetic expression. As she points out, there are more ways in which to understand why women may have chosen to write marathi than simply that they did not have other options. Her argument hinges on the notion that we have been constrained from understanding these poems as erotic because of incest taboos (as they were usually written for brothers) and that we might consider the sexuality expressed in these poems by expanding our understanding of sexuality as an economy of desire that is not necessarily carnal (p. 144). Hammond’s piece also suggests ways to read women’s poetry of this period beyond simply

29

focusing on marathi and outlines how these poems can be read productively with works of other genres.

Hammond’s warning against exaggerating the limitations placed on women’s literary production does not contradict the suggestion that we understand rithaʾ in relation to ritual mourning, nor does it change the fact that rithaʾ is the major form in which extant poetry by Arab women of this period exists. Al-Khansaʾ would not have chosen rithaʾ as a genre of creative expression from among many other genres in the same way that a modern writer chooses a genre. Evidence suggests that until relatively recently, elegies were the primary form in which women were expected to compose and that would allow their poetry to receive circulation and acclaim.36 The kinds of analyses produced by Hammond, DeYoung, and Stetkevych all suggest that women’s marathi participate in certain kinds of literary performances. This deepens the ways in which we can rethink al-Khansaʾ ’s literary production, rejecting essentialist ideas that link the gender of a poet to her literary production. If elegies were the preferred genre of poetic composition for women and the one in which they most excelled, and if the generic demands of marathi necessitated the mourning of dead male relatives, particularly brothers, then to write hundreds of lines of verse in this one genre for one dead brother person seems decidedly less odd. It certainly would not make the poet “unhinged.” Writing copious verses of marathi should perhaps be understood less as an obsession with death or with her dead brothers and indeed, possibly, as the most appropri-ate outlet that a talented poet might have had for her gift and skill.

This line of analysis can also help to cool the heated speculations about why al-Khansaʾ ’s poetry was almost exclusively composed for one man, including the implications of a “puzzling,” over-blown, or even incestuous relationship between her and her brother.37 As Stetkevych has pointed out, though women did write marathi for other people, it was considered most appropriate within the social function of this genre to mourn male relations directly related to their father’s family.38 Women thus tended not to write poetry for husbands and lovers and even in many cases sons, unless these men were related to the poet through her patriarchal bloodline. Therefore, it is not unusual that al-Khansaʾ did not write poems for her husband and sons—as Fariq suggests would have been more appropriate—even though the information that we have about the life of the putative al-Khansaʾ reports that she married several times throughout her life and that sons were born of these marriages. Her brother’s connection to her patriar-chal line would make him the more fitting object of her elegies than her husbands or sons. This reasoning seems to go a long way further towards explaining why al-Khansaʾ ’s poems were dedicated to her brother Sakhr, and not to a series of other men to whom she would have been close, than explanations based on her emotional attachment to him.

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Reflections on an Ambivalent Legacy

So how then does al-Khansaʾ cross over from Arabic to English? Though most English speakers may not know this poet by name, she is consistently invoked as a role model, foremother, and exemplary Arab woman within writing on Arab women authors, scholarship on Arab women, and anthol-ogies that include Arab women writers. I have argued here that this famous female poet, understood to be one of the most brilliant women creators of poetry in Arabic of all time, offers us a rich opportunity to understand a variety of competing discourses about Arab women through her English-language reception. Certainly one of the reasons for her invocation as a figure in so many English-language works is that she can inspire us to think differently about the roles and literary production of women from antiquity in the Arabian Peninsula. As a well-respected poet and creative producer of poetry in such an early period, al-Khansaʾ can help work against stereo-types of Arab women as passive and oppressed.

As this study has demonstrated, however, al-Khansaʾ ’s translation and reception in English has reproduced some of these problems in its very attempt to translate her to an English-reading audience. In pointing out the underlying problems with the translation and reception of al-Khansaʾ , my purpose here has not merely been to wag a finger at the ways in which the legacy of Orientalist fantasies about Arab women activate racist and sexist notions, which then produce problematic images of this Arab woman. I have also argued that we can work against these assumptions by develop-ing a nuanced and contextualized approach to reading Arab women and their creative texts, which engages the issue of translation directly. Such critiques often lead people outside the field to shy away from discussing Arab women for fear that any reading they produce will be “Orientalist.” Orientalism, like racism and sexism, informs English-language discourse, particularly when this discourse touches on Arab women. Rather than avoiding or sidestepping this issue, confronting its problems directly and discussing how it informs the translation and reception of Arab women will help in both the study of this poet and her poetry and also in approaching the study of Arab women’s texts more generally.

I thus have proposed here that al-Khansaʾ can be read as a case study for feminist scholars in English-speaking environments to think about issues introduced by the representation of women, particularly Arab women, from the past as well as from the present. My hope is that this study will impel us to contextualize, historicize, and think more deeply about literature and literary figures. This project works against the grain of studies that would reclaim al-Khansaʾ in order to teach us about how things “really were” for pre-Islamic Arabs or Arab women or to somehow prove that Arab women poets were just as good as male poets. If we choose to read al-Khansaʾ as

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an exemplary Arab woman poet, perhaps we can make an appreciation of her poetry and its contexts a part of this reading. If her personality and character were unusual, we can historicize this with more detail within her time and place; if her poetry is so important, we can work to understand the importance not only of her skills and talents but also her poetry’s genre and, importantly, the poetic institutions in which she participated. Perhaps al-Khansaʾ was a brilliant and creative poet and the rithaʾ genre was well-matched to her poetic sensibility. Perhaps she worked to master this par-ticular genre, and writing so many poems to one man was a challenge to her ability that she met with great success. With these suggestions, I hope to have contextualized the figure of al-Khansaʾ and her poetry as dynamic and integral parts of social landscapes that can help us more deeply understand poetry and the role of literature in its engagement with society, especially in its gender dynamics. But most importantly, I have dwelt here upon how the translation of al-Khansaʾ and her legacy can shed light upon the con-temporary English-language production of knowledge about Arab women.

It is partly because al-Khansaʾ remains an enigmatic figure in a num-ber of ways, both in her Arabic and her English-language reception, that she is so interesting. Because she is a figure from such an early era, about which relatively little is known, it is easy to project a range of meanings onto her. This lack of information also leaves open a range of possibilities for interpreting her ambiguous legacy for Arab women poets and writers and feminist scholarship on them today. Al-Khansaʾ ’s poetry is elegy: it celebrates wars, battles, death, and male heroism. How do we read women’s poetry and literature about war? Does this change in times of war? In wars where women are not the protagonists, how do their engagements with these issues matter? In a time of continued war and occupation in the Arab world, these issues are pressing; feminist responses in the Arabic- and English-speaking worlds are complex and themselves at times ambivalent. Some further questions being asked in these contexts include: should women be celebrating men who have fallen in battle or rejecting all con-nections to war and violence? What if these men died in self-defense, or as an act of resistance to occupation? What does martyrdom on the battlefield mean in the twenty-first century? How far should adulation of such figures go? Today we continually see reactions from puzzlement to disgust to anger in English-speaking contexts at Arab women who celebrate Arab men who have fallen in acts of resistance to occupation.

Though the poetry of al-Khansaʾ does not offer a direct response to these questions, understanding the complex dynamics of her transformations from Arabic into English can push us to think about which questions are pertinent in a twenty-first-century world in which war connects the Arabic- and English-speaking worlds in unequal exchanges of military power. This connection is a somewhat different way in which to use al-Khansaʾ as an

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exemplary figure. Rather than being exceptional to her culture, or stand-ing in metonymically for all Arab women as a foremother, or portrayed as a strong and beautiful (or strong and ugly) woman, we can see her as a particularly complex and useful example of how contextualization and historicization of poets and their works can offer glimpses both into the past and at ourselves. We are thus challenged to make the cross over, and ancient poetry of the Arabian Peninsula can become relevant—both in revealing more about gender in relation to the institution and production of literature in this time and place and also in how we study and discuss it.

NOTES

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada for providing funding that allowed me to finish this article, as well as the hard work of my research assistants Dima Ayoub and Nadia Wardeh. I appreciate the thoughtful comments of the anonymous reviewers and the friendly support of the editorial staff at Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Sincere thanks to friends and colleagues who read and commented on this article: Layla Dasmal, Setrag Manoukian, and Alessandro Olsaretti.

1 Classical examples include Ibn Qutayba, Ahmad Muhammad Shakir, and Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani; see Terri DeYoung, “Love, Death, and the Ghost of al-Khansaʾ : The Modern Female Poetic Voice in Fadwa Tuqan’s Elegies for Her Brother Ibrahim,” in Tradition, Modernity, and Postmodernity in Arabic Literature: Essays in Honor of Professor Issa J. Boullata, ed. Wael Hallaq and Kamal Abdel-Malek (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 45-75. For just a few modern examples, see Ibrahim Aʿwdayn, Diwan al-Khansaʾ : Dirasah wa-tahqiq (Cairo: Matbaʿ at al-Saʿadah, 1986);

Bint al-Shatiʾ , Al-Khansaʾ (Beirut: Dar al-Maʾ arif, 1957); Muhammad Jabir al-Hini, Al-Khansaʾ : Shaʿ irat bani Sulaym (Cairo: Al-Muʾ assasah al-Misriyah lil-taʿ lif wa-al-tarjamah wa-al-tibaʿah wa-al-nashr, 1963); Muhammad Karzun, Al-Khansaʾ : Sirah tarikhiyah adabiyah (Hims: Dar al-Maʿ arif, 1999); Yahya Aʿbd al-Amir Shami, Al-Khansaʾ : Shaʿ irat al-rithaʾ (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr al- Aʿrabi, 1999); Abu al- Aʿbbas Thaʿ lab, Sharh Diwan al-Khansaʾ (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al- Aʿrabi, 1993); and Husni Aʿbd al-Jalil Yusuf, al-Badiʿ fi shiʿ r al-Khansaʾ bayna al-ittibaʿ wa-al ibtidaʿ : Dirasah

balaghiyah naqdiyah (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anjilu al-Misriyah, 1993). 2 The “jihadist” magazine is called Al-Khansaʾ ; for a Western reaction to it, see

Sebastian Usher, “‘Jihad’ Magazine for Women on Web,” BBC News, 24 August 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3594982.stm.

3 The list is too extensive to cite all of them here, but for references to al-Khansaʾ in works on modern Arab women writers published in English, see Radwa Ashour, Ferial J. Ghazoul, and Hasna Reda-Mekdashi, eds., Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873-1999 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008), 1; Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), xxvi; Nathalie Handal, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (New York: Interlink, 2001), 1; Salma Khadra Jayyusi, “Modernist Arab Women Writers: A Historical Overview,” in Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community

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in Arab Women’s Novels, ed. Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman, and Therese Saliba (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 2-3; Mohja Kahf, “Braiding the Stories: Women’s Eloquence in the Early Islamic Era,” in Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America, ed. Gisela Webb (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 147-71; Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 128, 146, 169; Bouthaina Shaaban, “Women’s Forum: What Are Arab Women Authors Writing About?” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, February 1993, 36-37; Shaaban, “The Hidden History of Arab Feminism,” Ms. Magazine, May/June 1993, 76-77; and Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 10, 42, 43, 58, 79, 86. For references to al-Khansaʾ in works on Arabic literature more generally, see Aduonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans. Catherine Cobham (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 16; Roger Allen, An Introduction to Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 70, 94; Ignàc Goldziher, A Short History of Classical Arabic Literature, trans. Joseph DeSomogyi (Hildesheim: Olms, 1966), 21; Robert Irwin, Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (London: Penguin, 1999), 25-27, 239; Verena Klemm and Beatrice Gruendler, eds., Understanding Near Eastern Literatures: A Spectrum of Interdisciplinary Approaches (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000), 44, 56, 57; and Reynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (New York: Scribner, 1907), 126-27.

4 Ashour, Ghazoul, and Reda-Mekdashi, eds., Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873-1999 (see n. 3). Not only does the work open with a ref-erence to al-Khansaʾ , but the chapter on Lebanon by critic Yumna al-ʿ Id also invokes her in its opening lines (p. 13). She recounts famous anecdotes about how al-Khansaʾ has been considered by some to be the best early poet, regardless of gender.

5 Shaaban, “The Hidden History of Arab Feminism,” and “Women’s Forum” (see n. 3).

6 To give only a few examples of such studies, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 7, 141; Elizabeth Fernea and Basima Bezirgan, eds., Muslim Middle Eastern Women Speak (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 3; Mervat Hatem, “ʿAʾ isha Taymur’s Tears and the Critique of the Modernist and the Feminist Discourses on Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 84-85, 203; Azizah al-Hibri, “A Study of Islamic Herstory: or How did We Ever Get into This Mess?” Women’s Studies International Forum, 5, No. 2 (1982), 209; Naila Minai, “Women in Early Islam,” in Women in Islam: Tradition and Transition in the Middle East (London: John Murray, 1981), 16-17; Charis Waddy, Women in Muslim History (London: Longman, 1980), 70-71; and Wiebke Walther, Women in Islam From Medieval to Modern Times (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1993), 144-45.

7 Anthologies include A. J. Arberry, Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 38-40; Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, eds., A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (New York: Shocken, 1980), 92-98; Miriam Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, eds., Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War (Boulder: Westview, 1994),

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92; Carol Cosman, Joan Keefe, and Kathleen Weaver, eds., The Penguin Book of Women Poets (London: Penguin, 1978), 65-67; Robert Irwin, Night and Horses and the Desert, 25-27 (see n. 3); Nicholson, Translations of Eastern Poetry and Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 18-19; Omar S. Pound, Arabic and Persian Poems in English (New York: New Directions, 1970), 33-34; and Aʿbdullah al-Udhari, Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology (London: Saqi, 1999), 58-61.

8 The exceptions are Seeger A. Bonebakker, “Mubarrad’s Version of Two Poems by al-Khansaʾ ,” in Festschrift Ewald Wagner zum 65, ed. Wolfhart Heinrichs and Gregor Schoeler (Beirut: Steiner, 1994), 90-119; K. A. Fariq, “Al-Khansaʾ and her Poetry,” Islamic Culture, 31, No. 3 (1957), 210-19; and Alan Jones, Early Arabic Poetry, vol. 1, Marathı and Suʿ luk Poems (Oxford: Ithaca, 1992). Two excellent articles, which are theoretically innovative and interesting, have more recently appeared: DeYoung’s reading of modern Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan’s elegies through the lens of al-Khansaʾ in “Love, Death and the Ghost of al-Khansaʾ ” (see n. 1), and Marlé Hammond’s insightful rethinking of pre-Islamic women’s poetry in “Qasida, Marthiya, and Différance,” in Transforming Loss into Beauty: Essays on Arabic Literature and Culture in Honor of Magda Al-Nowaihi, ed. Hammond and Dana Sajdi (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008), 143-84. Hammond’s work is excerpted from her doctoral dissertation (written under the name Martha Latane Hammond), “The Poetics of S/exclusion: Women, Gender, and the Classical Arabic Canon” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003).

9 See Amal Amireh, “Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26 (2000), 215-49; Mohja Kahf, “Packaging ‘Huda’: Shaʿ rawi’s Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment,” in Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, ed. Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj (New York: Garland, 2000), 148-72; and Therese Saliba and Jeanne Kattan, “Palestinian Women and the Politics of Reception,” in Going Global, 84-112.

10 DeYoung, “Love, Death, and the Ghost of al-Khansaʾ ,” 51. 11 Fernea and Bezirgan, eds., Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak (see n. 6).

Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.12 Qadriyah Husayn, Shahirat Nisaʾ fi al-ʿAlam al-Islami [Women poets in the

Islamic world] (Beirut: Dar al-katibal- Aʿrabi, n.d.); and Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (see n. 3).

13 For examples of how this works differently in Arabic, see the modern exam-ples of scholarly work on al-Khansaʾ listed in n. 1. Al-Khansaʾ is still seen as an exceptional poet and role model in many cases, and the critiques often are infused with sexist ideas about women poets and writers, but the idea that al-Khansaʾ was estranged or distant from Arab society as an aberration are not present.

14 See, for example, Eric Ormsby, “Questions for Stones: On Classical Arabic Poetry,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 25, No. 1/2 (2001), 24; and Cosman, Keefe, and Weaver, eds., The Penguin Book of Women Poets, 65 (see n. 7). Subsequent refer-ences to The Penguin Book of Women Poets will be cited parenthetically in the text.

15 Hans Wehr, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. J. Milton Cowan (Ithaca, NY: Spoken Language Services, 1994), 304, s. v. “akhnas.”

16 Michael A. Sells, Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes by ʿAlqama, Shánfara, Labíd, ʿAntara, Al-ʿAsha, and Dhu al-Rúmma (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan

35

University Press, 1989), 5-6.17 Barnstone and Barnstone, eds., A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now

(see n. 7). Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.18 All of these authors might have been labeled as “Lebanese,” echoing another

problematic discourse that would set Lebanon apart as more “modern” than other Arab countries. On the labeling of Andrée Chedid specifically, see Michelle Hartman, “Multiple Identities, Multiple Voices: Reading Andrée Chedid’s La mai-son sans racines,” French Studies, 54 (2000), 54-66.

19 The editors incorrectly label Fadwa Tuqan’s place of birth as Jordan rather than Palestine. They also anachronistically label authors who were born, and even died, before 1948 as from “Israel,” which did not exist at the time.

20 Marilyn Booth, “On Translation and Madness,” Translation Review, 65 (2003), 48-49.

21 See Hosam Abou-Ela, “Challenging the Embargo: Arabic Literature in the U. S. Market,” MERIP: Middle East Report, Summer 2001, 42; Booth, “Translator v. Author (2007): Girls of Riyadh Go to New York,” Translation Studies, 1, No. 2 (2008), 197-211; and Edward Said, “Embargoed Literature,” The Nation, 17 September 1990, 278.

22 See Hammond, “Qasida, Marthiya, and Différance” (see n. 8); Dana al-Sajdi, “Trespassing the Male Domain: The ‘Qasidah’ of Layla al-Akhyaliyyah,” Journal of Arabic Literature, 31 (2000), 121-46; and works by Suzanne Stetkevych, for example, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), and “The Generous Eye/I and the Poetics of Redemption: An Elegy by al-Fariʾ ah b. Shaddad al-Murriyah,” in The Literary Heritage of Classical Islam: Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of James A. Bellamy, ed. Mustansir Mir (Princeton: Darwin, 1993), 85-106. Subsequent references to Hammond will be cited parenthetically in the text.

23 Alan Jones, Early Arabic Poetry, 97 (see n. 8). Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

24 Ormsby, “Questions for Stones,” 24.25 Pound, Arabic and Persian Poems in English, 73 (see n. 7).26 Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. Bernard Lewis, J. H. Kramers, H. A. R. Gibb, E.

Lévi-Povençal, C. Pellat, J. Schacht, new ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960-2005), 1027, s. v. “Al-Khansaʾ .”

27 Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998).

28 Kahf, “Packaging ‘Huda,’” 85-86.29 Nuha Samara, “La li-Khansaʾ al-madi,” Al-Shahid, 68 (1991), 65. 30 See Andre Lefevere, “The Case of the Missing Qasida,” in Translation,

Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London: Routledge, 1992); Sells, “The Qasdiah and the West: Self-Reflective Stereotype and Critical Encounter,” Al-ʿArabiyya, 20 (1987), 307-57; and Sells, Desert Tracings.

31 On the general difficulties of translating Arabic into English, see Aboul-Ela, “Challenging the Embargo”; Booth, “On Translation and Madness”; and Said, “Embargoed Literature.”

32 See, for example, Hammond and Sajdi, eds., Transforming Loss into Beauty, especially Hammond’s chapter, “Qasida, Marthiya and Différance” (see n. 8); al-Sajdi, “Trespassing the Male Domain”; Sells, Desert Tracings; and Stetkevych’s The

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Mute Immortals Speak and “The Generous Eye/I.”33 See Mikhail Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary

Scholarship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 130-31; and Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259.

34 Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, “The Generous Eye/I,” and also The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Subsequent references to The Mute Immortals Speak will be cited parenthetically in the text.

35 DeYoung, “Love, Death, and the Ghost of al-Khansaʾ ,” 50.36 For exceptions to this, see Hammond’s doctoral dissertation, “The Poetics

of S/exclusion” (see n. 8); and al-Sajdi’s discussion of Layla al-Akhyaliyya in “Trespassing the Male Domain.” Further research is needed to expand and nuance our views on this issue and show further exceptions to the prevalence of women’s poetry being elegies.

37 K. A. Fariq, “Al-Khansa and her Poetry,” 212 (see n. 8).38 She makes this point in several locations; see in particular The Mute Immortals

Speak and “The Generous Eye/I.”