“From Her Stomach to Her Lips”

Four Female Writers and One Male Reader in Amputated Tongue

Abstract

This article offers a reading of four stories from Amputated Tongue. “No!” by Sama Hassan, “The Gateway to the Body” by Sheikha Helawy, “The Fall of the Strong Man” by Asmahan Khalaila, and “The Grandfather and the Grandson” by Gharib Askalany. The stories were selected intuitively, on the basis of their immediate appeal they held for me while going through the collection. In hindsight, I was surprised to find out that three of the stories I chose were written by women, and that despite not speaking the language, I was aware of it. This raised for me issues concerning a gendered reading by a Jewish-Israeli man of literature created by Arab-Palestinian women, and the ways in which my cultural position defines and colors my reading experience and my understanding of them. Despite the linguistic and cultural barriers, the imaginative worlds constructed by these female authors—complemented by the singular male perspective represented in Askalany’s work—afforded me an indispensable imaginative, poetic, and psychological space. This space facilitated a sustained re-examination of entrenched attitudes toward women’s lives under intersecting forms of political, social, and marital oppression, while also preserving a capacity for empathetic engagement with the constraints and vulnerabilities experienced by male figures in the same sociocultural milieu.