Sexual Deviance!

Jihan Gazawi Aony
replies to the proprietor of al-Sayyad concerning his article "A Dialogue"

— Let him cast in his bucket who finds in himself the specialization, in his time the leisure, and in the depths of his soul the sincerity —

We have grown accustomed to finding in Mr. Freiha's quiver what dispels the soul's boredom — at times — and what sends laughter to fill the mouths, with much lightness of spirit and merriment of mood... So we in turn go about amusing ourselves with his successful and unsuccessful sallies, until we hardly finish before our crisis of boredom has ended by the easiest of paths. But we were not accustomed to find in that quiver of his that earnest preacher who sets himself up over us so squarely... to take the stance of the vigilant man of letters — deciding, settling, and imposing, at the expense of our poor literature — only to bring us, in his dialogue with his literary young lady, to the verdict that in the whole East there are no immortal women writers, and that because they all fail to draw from their camouflaged reality, like the women writers of the West, for instance... Mr. Freiha's quiver, with its particular "technique," as I think, has no room for this literary color of balanced, arduous character, because in all his sallies — as appears to everyone from that quiver still full of beloved jokes, and it shall remain so — he has never gone beyond being a clever pupil of the wandering journalist... How then, when he has made of his heroine (the woman writer) a pupil of his own, whom he guides and corrects, just as he created her so as to make himself her leader and her belittler?!

I marvel at something in this country of unconscious impressions... at these journalists... They fancy that with a single stroke of their flowing pen they turn the face of the globe, and that with a single one of their journalistic flights they give weight to falsehoods that are worthless trash, but which in their own estimation are prominent truths to be reckoned with.

The question is not one of Eastern and Western women writers, honorable sir! It is a question of sex, called in the scientific understanding male and female: the male has his nature and the female likewise hers, and this inevitable nature cannot possibly change unless it is warped or deviant — and we are not here now in a position of measures to make clear what must be made clear psychologically. Woman's nature is pious... proud... withdrawn; hence it was self-evident that her literature — in this respect alone — should bear a sweet imaginative stamp, which comes from the very heart of truth, to justify her emotional reserve, as in the poetry of Fadwa Tuqan and Nazik al-Mala'ika, for example.

As for the other domains of letters, she is free and frank in them, wanting no encouragement... nor does she lack knowing how to draw from the world of reality the drawing of one intelligent and well-versed, as in the stories of Samira Azzam and Bint al-Shati', for example.

I believe with certainty that Mr. Freiha has not read a single book by these women writers whom he gathered into a curious mixture and set upon a single plane, in order to say that immortality has not been written for them... otherwise he would not have thrust himself into this predicament!

Has he read (My Brother Ibrahim) by Fadwa Tuqan? And The Great Shadow by Samira Azzam? Has he perused (Bawh) by Edvick Shayboub? And Pictures from Their Lives by Bint al-Shati'? Has he read these and others besides — and they are many — so as to rule for them or against them? And to say that their literature is salon literature, that they shun a smile even in writing?!!

There is, my dear sir, a literature that truly deserves to be studied, and to have long successive hours — nay, long successive nights — devoted to it before an opinion is given upon it, even though it be a women's product... before we pelt it with belittlement, with unfitness, with lack of immortality, and with the charge that it has a color and no taste, merely upon learning that it is women's, and nothing more!!

Literature is temperament and emotion before it is feminine or masculine. Only afterward come its other components; it is not a boyish spurt that sweeps along its path the green and the dry, the cheap and the precious alike... Why then does Mr. Freiha want woman to strip herself bare in her writing?... Is this the realist literature in his view, and within the bounds of his conceptions?!

If anything remains for us to take pride in, brother Freiha — we women of this sweeping generation — it is our natural preservation of woman's innate modesty, above all in her earliest acquaintance with life... whether we be Eastern or Western; otherwise there would exist no femininity that men like you aspire to glorify, and that woman herself aspires to strengthen within her.

As for Mayy... yes, Mayy the genius, the warm of breath, Mayy who chafed at Gibran's mistiness despite her love for him and her devotion to him, out of her sincere (realism); Mayy into whose overflowing, pure well you cast your bucket without intent or design, as became clear to me, in order to speak your word about Mirdad even if you wished to make it a passing occasion — I do not think that anyone who has written about Mayy — and by God's praise they are many — shares this opinion of yours about her; and the greater likelihood is that you have not read a single line of what she wrote after the years of adolescence, the years of dreams flying upward toward idealism. For Mayy's literature will have immortality written for it — if there is any immortality for literature in an age that will race with the speed of deceptive lightning toward its ends — not because it is realistic or imaginative, nor because it is romantic or classical, but because it stamped with its imprint an epoch in the history of the literary renaissance at the beginning of this century. It was a powerful echo of a movement of transition out of the ages of stagnation, in whose blessed vanguard Mayy stood, as we see in most of her works, if not to say in all of them...

Then, do you truly want for the East a woman writer of the type of George Sand, to be immortal down the years?! George Sand was not libertine in that respect so much as she wanted to be free in all the aspects of life, and so much as she was faithful to her literature and loving of it. And that on the testimony of (Alfred de Musset) himself, when he accused her of coldness and rigidity in one of his letters to her; and on the testimony of her sick musician, who wearied of her company after she had bound him to work daily within a fixed span of hours, and who soon found the fitting opportunity to flee. So the cause of her immortality was not that leaping libertinism — as her critics of that day said of her, and as you too seem to have imagined — but her devotion to literature with such endurance and such love. Would that Mr. Freiha had counseled the women writers to be devoted to their literature without boredom or slackness; then he would have found himself absolved of his reckless, wandering counsels, and he would not have poured over his young lady this gushing torrent of commandments stamped with the name of the wandering journalist...

(— Why do you not offer people a picture of your life... of your feeling of deprivation, you the aware, cultivated young woman?

— Why do you not describe your feeling as you watch your brother live in an atmosphere of freedom, while you live a deprived captive, squandering your youth waiting for the knight of dreams to come himself and knock at the door?

— Why do you not blaze the trail before the daughters of your sex toward true literature!

— Why? And why? And why?)

And do these questions apply to your heroine, who is still under twenty-two? Is there any feeling of deprivation, when she fills eyes and ears and hearts, in the age of the rose and in the like of its radiance?

A young woman, my dear sir, at such an age stands at the utmost bounds of vitality, and vitality is an overpowering force; and this force may beget vanity and pride, or may cast into the depths of its possessor disdain and self-esteem — and in either case these stand as an impregnable dam against sinking low or yielding. There are other worlds she can cross, and many goals she can reach — among them this very one that Mr. Freiha wishes for, only not upon this disgraceful plane.

And do you truly want the girl to live as if in an atmosphere of abandon, so as not to squander her leafy youth waiting for the knight of dreams to knock at the door himself and say to her: here I am, I have had my fill, and I want to marry?

Is this how you want women for your East!

Is this how you want for it women writers with a mission in life!

Do you truly think the nation will reap fruit from such a literature — and what forbidden fruit that would be, my dear sir!

[O God: here the man has begun to offer, after all these successive ages, his tempting apple...

And as the apple was the beginning of human life, so shall the apple be the end of this life.]

Woman, then, will have departed from her feminine nature and become the equal of man without his knowing it or her knowing it; and then life will halt from the law of contention, since we would all become men — but men unfaithful to the truth of life...

And thus the cycle of time will stop, and with it will stop the part of men and women of letters in true production, because human life by then will have withered away, or be on the road to withering.

Is this raving, O preacher with the quiver?

I do not think the psychologists will endorse you in uttering that word, should you wish to defend your foolish theory with it, for they will place you, without the least mercy, on the list of those who strew the road with roses before sexual deviance.