The Woman's Word: On Nazik al-Mala'ika's Lecture

The Woman's Word

Last month the Iraqi poetess Miss Nazik al-Mala'ika stood to analyze our Arab society, and charged it with senility, for its rigidity and its arrested growth — the first attribute of a young society that looks toward a better life...

As I followed the lecture's philosophical and psychological analysis with great admiration, acknowledging her depth of thought and breadth of learning, one merit among her many praiseworthy merits stood out in my eyes: her surpassing boldness, of a candor we have not been accustomed to in treatments of this kind.

I listened to Miss Nazik al-Mala'ika heap charges in the face of our society, defying the fanatical reactionary elements, without an eyelid fluttering or a tremor of dread touching her nerves!.. She brought new social theories whose raising up requires the demolition of many of our prevailing systems and the abolition of a whole set of our traditions, which have petrified — and with their petrifaction our minds and our thoughts have petrified too — so that we have sat back from creation and from setting forth, and been afflicted with a social "fragmentation" that can lead us to no hoped-for good.

How long I have searched among our women — even among our men — for an enlightened boldness like the boldness of Nazik al-Mala'ika, fit to carry the torch, and found no trace of it; for we have grown used to submission and servility, and what stood between us and revolt against our condition, or the surpassing of it, was an inherited cowardice — or perhaps a deep-seated numbness that has run in our blood through long generations, until we grew used to it and came to love it! So we were not surprised when Miss al-Mala'ika's boldness was met, by some, with harshness and astonishment, as though she had committed an outrage! And were it not for the intercession of her evident sincerity and her deep learning, and were it not for their being set at ease by her good intention, nothing would have held them back from making war on her and proclaiming their pent-up resentment!

Therefore I say: what stirred my admiration most in the lecture, above her lofty poetry and her precise scientific analysis, was her boldness — which our sick society misses most sorely of all — and her sincerity of delivery, which bars the road to the rigid reactionaries... and her natural leaning toward simplicity in all its manifestations...

Nazik al-Mala'ika today is a summit among the women of the Arabs; she is true to herself and to her word... She walks fully equipped, confident, toward a goal that is no longer far off...