Under the patronage of Professor Mohammad Anagreh, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, the Department of English Language and Literature organized a lecture delivered by Professor Hanadi Al-Samman, University of Virginia, USA. Al-Samman talked about the heritage of Arab women writers and feminist scholarship while deviating from previous literary theories that defined the experience of authorship for Western male writers as dialectic, Oedipal interactions with predecessors, “anxiety of influence”, and “anxiety of authorship”. She explained that Arab women writers experience their authorship as an anxiety of a double erasure, both literary and physical. This is evident, she said, not only in the frame story of A Thousand and One Nights, but also in the female’s physical eradication exemplified in Wa’d al-banat’s (female infant burial), jahiliyya practice.
Al-Samman stated that all past scholarship on Arab women’s writings has employed Shahrazad’s trope, once the work moved from the oral to the written version, as either a model to emulate or to veer away from. Simultaneously, she remarked the existence of al-maw’udah as another significant cultural trope in Arab women’s oeuvre. This trope has not only manifested itself in the works of writers who hail from Muslim backgrounds, but also Christian ones. Thus, she said that it is necessary to address the writers’ attempts to combat both the literary erasure of women’s writings signified in Shahrazad’s trope and the physical erasure of women’s bodies and traces found in the resurrection of Wa’d cultural motif. Coupling these two motifs in what is called “the anxiety of erasure” in Arab women’s poetics has the advantage of tracing the wounds enacted by literary and physical traumas in a way that transforms the present and illuminates the future. Just as diasporic women authors transform Shahrazad’s corpus from orality to the written word, so in their work the surviving female body enables the physical, sexual, and symbolic resurrection of Al-mau’udah.
At the end of her talk, introduced by Dr. Abdullah Dagamseh, Head of the Department of English Language and Literature, and attended by the faculty and students of the Department and the Faculty of Arts, Professor Hanadi answered the questions raised by the audience.
