Article
Feminist poetry in Morocco: A Preliminary Reading
January 18, 2006
This reading presents its share of questions. Does the topic of feminist poetry imply (and endorse) the difference – an assumed difference – between male and female texts? Is not poetic writing the same in its discourse reflecting a shared reality?(1) Is it possible to imagine a feminine self without conjuring up the presence of the male even on the subconscious level? It is true all poets, women and men, have an individual response to reality and does the output highlight the tense dialectic between the two? And finally, what specificity, can one state, characterizes feminist poetry? This “assumed specificity” is what our reading here attempts to reconstruct through the structural role of the creative feminine ‘I’ and the assumed masculine self ‘he’ as sublimated in the creative process.
In my belief, the poetic experimentation in the works of Malikah al-Asemi is a prominent example. She celebrates the feminine in a frantic search to realize the self outside the doxological authority of the male as well as expending all the possibilities that such exposure to the world would mean for the self:
I undress my chastity at night
and open my sun completely
totally possessed by madness
a glow inhabits me
I sit
I move through waves
like a billowing sea. (2)
The images of madness, luminosity, and the fluid movement of waves are predominant metaphors that colour the creative output of Moroccan poetesses reflecting a yearning to expose what is beneath the mask of silence, to liberate oneself from the imperialist ‘other’ that resides within the poetic self/persona seeking to pull her down.
You who plucks me on this rainy night
like a blooming cherry
on the dewy branches
You who walks between the branches
touching me
I fall in your hands,
discovering gravity
discovering the law of the universe (3)
The works of another woman poet, Wafa’ al-Umrani, is an example of the representative feminine ‘I’ and the masculine ‘he’ lavishly demonstrated through the prism of Sufi language. This Sufism is not entirely spiritual; a physical dimension replete with metaphors is alluded to indirectly:
Like a violet flower that holds light
blueness
and scent,
I rehearsed to dance on
the cheeks of an atheist
Possession is my pulse
with clouds as the only clothed arcade between us. (4)
Wafa’ al-Umrani’s poetic experience attains a sophisticated level of artistic maturity both linguistically and visually as well as exhibiting an acute historical awareness of the sexual conflict. These points qualify her to occupy a special status on the poetic scene – among both sexes – without contradicting the categorical divisions between the feminine ‘I’ and the masculine ‘he’. Both represent the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ in mutual discourse.
Time is zero
without before or after
I too
have forgotten yesterday. (5)
One can also sense in the writings of these women poets a need to reconstruct new laws that would free women from the handed down maxims and the degrading imagery which men have described them. Here is an example from the poem of Hakimah al-Shawi:
Cursed is he my lady
who said
that from a broken rib you emerged
Cursed is he my lady
who named you
the sign of approval is silence
Cursed from the beginning of creation
is he who said you were a pudenda
from your voice till your toes
. . .
Cursed is he who betrays your sex
When you are a progeny of the human race
of the moon
and the sun. (6)
Truly the poetic voice here is a loud scream of objection on the rigid ideas that characterize the male ideology resonating throughout religious, political and cultural discourse seeking to preserve the established privileges and benefits. It is a scream that demands respect to the woman in order that she can continue, according to Virginia Woolf, to “write as a woman but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.” (7)
At the same time it is also a scream that challenges the assumed maxims where protest, revolution and struggle is assumed to be the prerogative of male poets while nature, seclusion, the torment of early love affairs, and crying over the lost lover should be the topics of female poets. It is for this reason that many of Moroccan poetesses’ poems transcend the boundaries of traditional struggle with the male to engage with another wider struggle involving the political realities of intrigue, conspiracies and the icons of the motherland as its victims. Here is what Hakimah al-Shawi says on the martyr al-Mahdi Ben Barkah:
Forty years
since those in control of the world have dropped
the suns of this land
In the red billows.
Its solicitors sold the stars
and dimmed the light of his eyes
Placing the silent past
on his lips.
The feminine in the women’s poetry reflects both its presence and its reaction in the discourse of the duality of the ‘I’ and the ‘other’; the individual self and the communal self; the private and the public, the personal and the objective, the sensual and the abstract, the visual and the immaterial, the realistic and the poetic. It represents two paradoxical needs: the longing for liberation from existence as well as a longing to make existence real. This dynamic is the axis of their poetic experiment.
Notes
1) Beatrice Didier, L’Ecriture-Femme, ed. PUF., Paris, 1981, p. 39.
2) Malikah al-Asimi, from her poem ‘Ibda’ (Creativity), Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. Ed. Salah Busreif and Mustafa al-Nisaburi. Dar al-Thaqafah, 1998, p. 237.
3) Ibid., p. 239.
4) Wafa’ al-Umrani, Fitnat al-aqasi, Casa Blanca: Silsilat al-Sada, n.d., p. 44.
5) Ibid., p. 95.
6) Hakimah al-Shawi, Ishraqat al-Jurh wal-Ishq, Rabat: Matba’at al-Kawthar, 2001, p. 48.
7) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. London: Harcourt Inc., 1989, p. 93.
Latifah al-Maskini takes a look at women’s poetry in Morocco:“The feminine in the women’s poetry reflects both its presence and its reaction in the discourse of the duality of the ‘I’ and the ‘other’; the individual self and the communal self; the private and the public, the personal and the objective, the sensual and the abstract, the visual and the immaterial, the realistic and the poetic.”
This preliminary reading does not claim to be a comprehensive overview of Moroccan feminist poetry. The most it can do is to present a cursory review of a few landmarks while being consciously aware of the likelihood of unfairly overlooking other poetic feminine voices that are no less original and lucid. Therefore, this presentation is a partial reading that attempts to treat the selected poets equally. It is also a very personal reading reflecting an interaction (and unconscious slips) on the part of the reviewer with the texts at hand. No doubt, every secondary reading is directed by an aesthetic perspective all of its own.This reading presents its share of questions. Does the topic of feminist poetry imply (and endorse) the difference – an assumed difference – between male and female texts? Is not poetic writing the same in its discourse reflecting a shared reality?(1) Is it possible to imagine a feminine self without conjuring up the presence of the male even on the subconscious level? It is true all poets, women and men, have an individual response to reality and does the output highlight the tense dialectic between the two? And finally, what specificity, can one state, characterizes feminist poetry? This “assumed specificity” is what our reading here attempts to reconstruct through the structural role of the creative feminine ‘I’ and the assumed masculine self ‘he’ as sublimated in the creative process.
In my belief, the poetic experimentation in the works of Malikah al-Asemi is a prominent example. She celebrates the feminine in a frantic search to realize the self outside the doxological authority of the male as well as expending all the possibilities that such exposure to the world would mean for the self:
I undress my chastity at night
and open my sun completely
totally possessed by madness
a glow inhabits me
I sit
I move through waves
like a billowing sea. (2)
The images of madness, luminosity, and the fluid movement of waves are predominant metaphors that colour the creative output of Moroccan poetesses reflecting a yearning to expose what is beneath the mask of silence, to liberate oneself from the imperialist ‘other’ that resides within the poetic self/persona seeking to pull her down.
You who plucks me on this rainy night
like a blooming cherry
on the dewy branches
You who walks between the branches
touching me
I fall in your hands,
discovering gravity
discovering the law of the universe (3)
The works of another woman poet, Wafa’ al-Umrani, is an example of the representative feminine ‘I’ and the masculine ‘he’ lavishly demonstrated through the prism of Sufi language. This Sufism is not entirely spiritual; a physical dimension replete with metaphors is alluded to indirectly:
Like a violet flower that holds light
blueness
and scent,
I rehearsed to dance on
the cheeks of an atheist
Possession is my pulse
with clouds as the only clothed arcade between us. (4)
Wafa’ al-Umrani’s poetic experience attains a sophisticated level of artistic maturity both linguistically and visually as well as exhibiting an acute historical awareness of the sexual conflict. These points qualify her to occupy a special status on the poetic scene – among both sexes – without contradicting the categorical divisions between the feminine ‘I’ and the masculine ‘he’. Both represent the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ in mutual discourse.
Time is zero
without before or after
I too
have forgotten yesterday. (5)
One can also sense in the writings of these women poets a need to reconstruct new laws that would free women from the handed down maxims and the degrading imagery which men have described them. Here is an example from the poem of Hakimah al-Shawi:
Cursed is he my lady
who said
that from a broken rib you emerged
Cursed is he my lady
who named you
the sign of approval is silence
Cursed from the beginning of creation
is he who said you were a pudenda
from your voice till your toes
. . .
Cursed is he who betrays your sex
When you are a progeny of the human race
of the moon
and the sun. (6)
Truly the poetic voice here is a loud scream of objection on the rigid ideas that characterize the male ideology resonating throughout religious, political and cultural discourse seeking to preserve the established privileges and benefits. It is a scream that demands respect to the woman in order that she can continue, according to Virginia Woolf, to “write as a woman but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.” (7)
At the same time it is also a scream that challenges the assumed maxims where protest, revolution and struggle is assumed to be the prerogative of male poets while nature, seclusion, the torment of early love affairs, and crying over the lost lover should be the topics of female poets. It is for this reason that many of Moroccan poetesses’ poems transcend the boundaries of traditional struggle with the male to engage with another wider struggle involving the political realities of intrigue, conspiracies and the icons of the motherland as its victims. Here is what Hakimah al-Shawi says on the martyr al-Mahdi Ben Barkah:
Forty years
since those in control of the world have dropped
the suns of this land
In the red billows.
Its solicitors sold the stars
and dimmed the light of his eyes
Placing the silent past
on his lips.
The feminine in the women’s poetry reflects both its presence and its reaction in the discourse of the duality of the ‘I’ and the ‘other’; the individual self and the communal self; the private and the public, the personal and the objective, the sensual and the abstract, the visual and the immaterial, the realistic and the poetic. It represents two paradoxical needs: the longing for liberation from existence as well as a longing to make existence real. This dynamic is the axis of their poetic experiment.
Notes
1) Beatrice Didier, L’Ecriture-Femme, ed. PUF., Paris, 1981, p. 39.
2) Malikah al-Asimi, from her poem ‘Ibda’ (Creativity), Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. Ed. Salah Busreif and Mustafa al-Nisaburi. Dar al-Thaqafah, 1998, p. 237.
3) Ibid., p. 239.
4) Wafa’ al-Umrani, Fitnat al-aqasi, Casa Blanca: Silsilat al-Sada, n.d., p. 44.
5) Ibid., p. 95.
6) Hakimah al-Shawi, Ishraqat al-Jurh wal-Ishq, Rabat: Matba’at al-Kawthar, 2001, p. 48.
7) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. London: Harcourt Inc., 1989, p. 93.
© Latifah al-Maskini
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