Motherhood in Arabic/African literary texts. (c2015)

Abstract

Silence, purity and sacrifice have been internalized as values of honorific motherhood for ages all over the world. But since the appearance of the second-wave feminism, and as part of the generalized fight-back against oppression, feminists came to reject these values which they think embody a male vision. They argue that motherhood is not innate but rather a cultural construct. In the Arab world as well as in western Africa, any simple questioning of the traditional maternal discourse is condemned. Still, there are serious female voices in the Arab world as well as in Africa who break the silence around maternal experience in literary works, as well as in films and paintings. This thesis aims to show that the male vision of ideal motherhood as shown in Ghassan Kanafani’s Um Saad (1969) and Mongo Beti’s Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness (1978) is based on an agenda that sustains patriarchy and that supports nationalism. These two novels define the ideal mother figure according to the criteria of silence, purity, and sacrifice. The mother who doesn’t fit into these categories is viewed as an evil mother. In contrast, the thesis examines the rejection of the internalized patriarchal metanarrative of motherhood by 2 female authors: the Palestinian Sahar Khalifeh in The Door of the Courtyard (1999) and the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta in The Joys of Motherhood (1979). These two novels move away from prevalent depictions of honorific motherhood and demonstrate that society programs women to be followers to their husbands and to their male offspring. This rejection by female writers of the traditional representation of ideal mothers, and their denouncement of patriarchy and nationalism, reflect an awareness of the multiple ways in which their status as second class citizens is reinforced in the “third world.”