Academic Year 2009-2010

Mothers and Daughters: A Conversation with Hanan al-Shaykh and Mariam Said
Thursday, September 17, 2009
ASEAN Auditorium, Cabot Intercultural Center
Speakers: Hanan al-Shaykh, author of The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story; Mariam Said, Vice President, Barenboim-Said Foundation USA, published A World I Loved: the Story of An Arab Woman

Summary

Tufts University Provost Jamshed Bharucha introduced Jonathan Wilson, Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at Tufts University, who moderated the discussion between Mariam Said and Hanan al-Shaykh. Said is the Vice President of the Barenboim-Said Foundation USA, a charitable organization devoted to intercultural conciliation through music co-founded by her late husband, Edward Said, while al-Shaykh is a former journalist and author of four books in Arabic. Both women have recently published books dealing with the experiences of women in twentieth century Lebanon.

Mariam Said’s book, A World I Loved: the Story of An Arab Woman, was originally written in Arabic by her late mother, Wadad Makdisi Cortas, and describes life in Lebanon and the surrounding Middle East from 1917 to Cortas’ death in 1979. Cortas’ first job was teaching at a girl’s school in Baghdad where she became principal by the age of 26, and devoted large amounts of time to convincing students’ parents not to marry their daughters off at very young ages. Said re-wrote her mother’s book in English. Her own daughter, Najla Said, read aloud excerpts from the book.

Hanan al-Shaykh read excerpts of a very different memoir about her mother from The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story. Al-Shaykh’s mother had been born in a poor southern Lebanese village, and was engaged at 11, before being married at age 15 to al-Shaykh’s father, a man twice her age. The marriage was unhappy and al-Shaykh’s mother was unusual for her time as she divorced her husband to marry her lover. In order to do so, she had to leave her children, abandoning al-Shaykh at age 7. However, al-Shaykh argues that her mother did a brave thing by taking a stand against family, society, and tradition in order to remain independent and stay true to herself.

Wilson pointed out that both women, while living vastly different lives, were “extraordinarily progressive.” They both expected the Middle East to democratize, and Said spoke of her mother’s shock at the Iranian revolution, which occurred a few months before she died. From a Quaker Christian family, she had never dreamt that a religious revolution would occur in the Middle East. Al-Shaykh’s mother had a very different upbringing in a poor Muslim Shia family, and remained illiterate throughout her life. She always had someone read aloud her daughter’s writings. Al-Shakyh explained that because her mother had been illiterate, she never had a voice. Al-Shakyh wrote this book in the first person in order to give her one. She had been reluctant to do so, as she did not want to revisit the past and write criticisms not only of herself that her mother would have thought, but also of her mother’s estranged husband, al-Shaykh’s pious father. Her mother always felt that her story was more important than others “who had led privileged lives,” and whose stories were far more likely to have been told.

Both authors offer unique investigations into 20th century Middle Eastern history as seen through the eyes of two very different women.

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