Live Encounters Arab Women Poets & Writers June 2026
Breaking boundaries and deconstructing the sacred
In the writings of Arab Women Writers
guest editorial by Dr Salwa Gouda.
I feel lucky to have had the chance to translate the literary works of 17 Arab women writers from a wide range of cultural and geographical backgrounds. For me, translation is never a mechanical process of swapping out Arabic words for English ones. Instead, it involves something more challenging and unavoidable: the act of making the text feel at home for the target reader, a process known as domestication. What is more astonishing for me with these texts is that they not only carry the themes historically connected with women, but they move further to express the dilemma of Man in modern life. Arab women poets and writers did not follow the advice of the French feminist critic Hélène Cixous to write only themselves and their suffering as a challenge for male norms and cannons “Je l’écris” but for these authors, the act of writing is a way to actively create a new reality or identity, not just to passively describe an existing one. Their understanding of “Je l’écris ” is to reclaim power and give voice to experiences, bodies, and truths that have been suppressed or ignored. It is, in fact, a political and personal act of defiance. Moreover, the texts of these Arab women writers show their full engagement with all the ills and pains of the world beside the challenges they face in their surrounding due to gender classification and cultural distinction. In fact, through this engaging experience of translating the literary works of Arab women writers, I’ve rediscovered myself and the world.
Within the literary and intellectual visions of Arab women writers, the sacred and rebellious body is deconstructed alongside generational conflict and existential emptiness, as time fractures into surreal absurdity and maternal grief turns death into a cryptic message. The impotence of poetry before national tragedy contrasts with feminine Sufism and a covenant with blue, as the poets deny the poetic self and experience alienation from their own being. Arab women writers also give voice to the oppressed marginal female, traces a failed Sufi journey toward independence, and portrays a wounded homeland in painful waiting. Structural female oppression renders the body a site of guilt, yet poetry remains like a loyal dog, and error resembles knowledge. Hunger for cuddling equates death with a job, love becomes a cross, the garment an extension, and the exiled homeland opens a window in the stone. What follows is a structural analysis that attempts to approach and trace their core ideas and dreams.
Dima Mahmoud believes that the dismantling of the sacred, the rebellious body and female as treasure of pain begin with the deconstruction of natural symbols and absolutes (“The rose does not acknowledge the absolute / so it practices contradiction twice”), and breaks sexual and class taboos (“The rose practices sex when crowds gather in public squares”), while presenting the female as a repository of pain (“The girl who planted her heart in her eyes / to season time and ghosts”). This intersects with the generational struggle and existential void of the poet Fawzia Alawi Alawi where the curse of poetry appears (“If not for this curse of poetry / that drank my heart”) versus the mother’s gaze, which she considers “a loser,” and the cosmic void (“Nothing but time, / nothing but space. / What am I to do with all this eternity?”), then with the deconstruction of time, absurdity, and artistic sacrifice of the Egyptian poet Ghada Kamal that makes death beautiful (“Death is beautiful but crying ruins it”) and shatters frames (“All picture frames must be broken”) and presents Van Gogh’s sacrifice as a model (“Van Gogh cut off his ear / and offered it as a sacrifice of silence”).
On the other hand, Hanna Metwally sees sorrow and death as messages that “Sorrow never runs out. / Sorrow renews itself,” with rituals of invoking the dead where “Samia lights incense… raises her voice with his favorite song” then comes the message “Mama… it was his voice.” This meets with the impotence of poetry and the dying homeland of the Libyan poet Hawaa Al-Qamudi where “My country is dying” while the threshold of morning wants a hot poem, and the girl who loves frogs turns into a frog because “the frog prince never came,” and the poet admits that “Nonsense I write means nothing to anyone / it does not warm a freezing child.” As for the feminized Sufism and the covenant with blue, Heba Al Ghonaimy, offers a different spiritual solution: “No woman is sacred / except the one who keeps the covenant with blue,” where blue represents the motherhood of the universe and the clarity of silence. In Zaynab Laouedj ‘s poems, there are two main ideas: returning to paradise is possible (in “The Apple of Temptation”: “paradise is still open to its own people” and “your room is exactly as you left it”), and the complete collapse of language and existence (in “Nothing left but cold ash”: “alphabets with no spark in them except cold ash” and “we’re drowning in words worm-eaten from the inside”).
As for the negation of the poetic self and the poem as an existential structure Hind Zaytouni declares, “I have never written a poem in my life. / I was only removing / heavy rocks from my chest,” and one poem is enough “to build a house of living tears.” This aligns with the alienation of the self and the difficulty of anchoring in writing by Mastoura Mesfer Alorabi, who describes herself as “the one who is hard to pin down in writing: / my grapes were not eaten, / my baskets were not carried,” and admits, “Whenever my mirrors tremble / I shiver.” Connected to them is the voice of the oppressed and the marginalized woman by Nadia Mohamed, who says, “I am not important. / When I disappear, no one asks,” but she carries a bullet “for whoever breaks the ankle of my heart / with a stone of fire.” Also, In Maha Alautoom’s poems, the poet’s crisis revolves around her tense relationship with writing: at times she rejects the constraints of meter and rhyme and wishes for poetry as “light” as a slender body (“Without Conditions”); at other times she discovers she has given the poem everything (her lungs, her blood, her dreams) only for it to be the one to leave her and set her free (“What the Poem Left”); and at times she loses the poem completely and searches for it under stones and above the clouds, even though it once walked with her, declaring her rejection of all ready-made classifications of poetry (“Did you forget the way?”).
Moreover, the failed Sufi journey and complete independence in Rim Gomri ‘s poetry tests the path of salt in search of the sea (“I walked the path of salt, / searching for the sea, / and you watched me from afar”) then declares liberation: “Today, / no one saves me from myself / except me,” and “all my little things are mine… my voice / my body / the pallor of the moon on my face / all of them belong to me alone.” While the wounded homeland and the lover as a soothsayer by Roshan Ali Jaan cries out, “O country sleeping in its ruin / everything after you hurts me” and describes herself as “I am the scattered pain / on your precious smile,” and fears “the last wound” and “the mythical rituals / that give the mouth of the wound / to the pain of the poem.”
In addition, Safaa Elnagar reveals the structural oppression of the female and the body as a site of guilt and how the tall girl becomes a thief (“Grandmother threw her word: ‘She must have stolen her brother’s height while he was sleeping'”), and how “silence is the language I mastered,” and she shrinks into herself “terrified that someone might smell the scent of this new secret.” This meets with poetry as a loyal dog and error as knowledge in Samira Al Bouzidi, who abandons poetry but it “follows my trail like a loyal dog,” and declares, “Error is knowledge, / and knowledge is existence,” and asks, “How would I have discovered uprightness if I had not stumbled?” As for the hunger for an embrace and death as a job Sherine Fathy describes an institution that distributes hugs: “A hug is a human state. A right. A desire and a natural need to feel safe,” while an ad for “Employees Wanted for the Afterlife” haunts her, and she finds herself on a staircase with no return.
Also, the theme of love as crucifixion and the dress as an extension, the poet Tahani Hassan Alsubaih addresses her lover: “Come, crucify me between your sides as a lover,” and her dress becomes “a night of images” and “a bridge crossed by lovers, from the Bedouins to the city dwellers.” And finally, the exiled homeland and opening a window in the stone, the poet Touria Majdouline summarizes the collective experience: “A homeland that does not begin with your name-a place of exile. / A day that does not rise from your lips-a stone stretching out its limbs,” and she asks, “Let me open a window in the stone, / so that beautiful losses do not preoccupy me,” and chooses to remain “forever imagined.”
To conclude, I feel I need a whole life to interpret the ideas and read the hearts of these distinguished writers on the way of Sigmund Freud. These seventeen female voices are united by a profound awareness that women in the Arab world experience alienation on multiple levels: alienation from their own bodies, which are controlled; from their poetry, constrained by traditional meters and rhymes; from their homeland, which is stolen, occupied, or exiled; from their mothers, who mourn a bygone era; from their lovers, who are either absent or present in an incomplete way; from death, which comes suddenly or is long awaited; and even from the language itself, which is no longer able to express their suffering in an absurd uncontrollable universe. Yet this sorrowful awareness transforms into a space for rebellion: breaking boundaries, deconstructing the sacred, exposing contradictions, reinventing myths, opening windows in stone, and dancing madly on the ruins of the traditional poem. These poets remain, each in her own way, “forever dreamers”, for imagination alone, as Samira Al Bouzidi says, “an immortal devil kicking the earth.”
© Dr Salwa Gouda
Dr Salwa Gouda is an accomplished Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic affiliated with the English Language and Literature Department at Ain Shams University. Holding a PhD in English literature and criticism, Dr. Gouda pursued her education at both Ain Shams University and California State University, San Bernardino. She has authored several academic works, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, among others. Dr. Gouda also played a significant role in translating The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers, a comprehensive project featuring poets, philosophers, historians, and literary figures, conducted under the auspices of UNESCO. Recently, her poetry translations have been featured in a poetry anthology published by Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Her work has also appeared in numerous international literary magazines, further solidifying her contributions to the field of literary translation and criticism.