Jihan Gazawi Aony replies to the proprietor of al-Sayyad concern-ing 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 mer-riment 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 "tech-nique," 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 impres-sions... 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 promi-nent 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 psychologi-cally. 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 withdrawn; hence it was self-evident that her literature — in this respect alone — should bear a sweet imaginative stamp, which comes from the very heart of truth, to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 encourage-ment... 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... oth-erwise 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 unfit-ness, 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