Decoupling Lust & Love
A Review of We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, edited by Selma Dabbagh
Reviewed by Evelyn Jean Pine
This luscious anthology, We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, edited by Selma Dabbagh, is a book you can’t resist. It will get under your skin, burrow into your brain, and penetrate your heart. Trust me. You want it.
The book’s title evokes a poem by Ulayya bint al-Mahdi, a daughter of the 3rd Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi who reigned in Baghdad from 775- 785 CE. She writes:
We wrote in symbols amid those who were present,
Insinuations implied with no lines,
But eyes recounting their suffering
With imaginary hands on the parchments of hearts.
Open the book at random and discover contemporary Moroccan writer and photographer, Mouna Ouafik whose work has never been published in English before. Dive into her poem, “Orgasm”:
Quick as that the tissues of my clitoris fill up with blood.
Each time I see white plastic gloves,
I get turned on.
Or lean into 11th century Andalusian Berber poet, Umm al-Ala bit Yusuf, who writes in “If Love and Song”:
If love and song were not spoilt by wine, I’d spend my time
drinking glass after glass and get what I longed for.
As Dabbagh, a British-Palestinian writer, reminds us: “Women were writing in Arabic long before the first book known to have been written by a woman in English . . . . Readers may be aware of the ancient literary tradition of the erotic in the Arab world among its writers. We Wrote in Symbols is distinctive in relying on the women themselves to present this tradition using a variety of literary forms”.
The writings she selects often wrestle with both the connection and the decoupling of lust and love. Short stories and excerpts from novels lead us to chic dinner parties and family dinners, sex clubs, literary readings, fancy hotel rooms, outhouses in a refugee camp, and the six hour and fifty-five minute drive from Riyadh to Doha. Yet, the physical body is the site of most of this poetry and prose: flesh, bones, blood and brains.
The power of physical movement and sensation is celebrated in multifarious ways. As Moroccan writer, Rita (Ghita) El Khayat describes in her poem, “Messalina Unbound,” about the Roman Empress famous for her sexual appetites: “and she is shaken, shocked, an electric storm of the sense, complete.”
Or like the heroine of Lebanese author Joumana Hadda’s story, “Lovers Should Only Wear Moccasins,” who, as she dances alone at a sex club,
“ . . . forgot everything: war, wars, big and little, around and inside her, loneliness, self-sabotage, fears, masks, blows, regrets, vulnerability, secrets, incomprehension, shame, betrayal, guilt, lies. . . . As many wounds (given and received, but what’s the difference?) as experiences in her life. She forgot the mistakes she’d made and those she was still to make and began to really dance.”
Palestinian-American writer Naomi Shihab Nye, former Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States, revels in what lust allows us to accomplish in her poem, “Two Countries”:
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travellers, that people go places
larger than themselves.
This book is as lively as sex talk with friends, fun and/or fraught as a one-night stand, or as weighty and wild as a life with one person you adore. Because this literature is so evocative, compelling, sneaky, sinuous, open, tightly woven, you cannot read this book as a voyeur, but only as an adventurer, who digs in. The characters and voices in these pieces discover themselves through sex and hide themselves in love and vice versa whether reaching out for their own pleasure or stoically trying to please a partner.
Of course, our sexuality isn’t created only from flesh, blood, bones, and brains, but also culture, tradition, and politics. Even as it goes deep, the writing looks out of itself into the future as well as the past. Saieda Rouass is inspired by Psyche and Cupid who first appeared in The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis. The narrator of Rouass’s “A Free Girl’s Tale” says ruefully, “I had failed in my love with him because the rules of love were designed that way.”
The metaphor of stories, books and literature resonates throughout We Wrote In Symbols, making the shaping of love and lust into art a profound act of connection. As Franco-Tunisian author, Collete Fellous writes in her story, “Mahdia,”:
Then night came to fold our bodies back together, as if closing a book, and I welcomed it in, and wept.
In the excerpt from the novel, Adele, by a Franco-Moroccan writer, Leila Slimani, the heroine delights in: “That moment of anticipation when everything is still possible, and she is the mistress of the magic. She greedily drinks a mouthful of wine. A drop trickles over her lips and down her chin and drips on the collar of her white dress before she can stop it. It’s a detail of the story and she’s the one who wrote it.”
Or as Lebanese author Zeina B. Ghandour writes in her poem, “You Cunt,” “I am not a metaphor or a literary device.”
Often these authors unmask what is hidden, as Abbasid poet Ulayya bint Al-Mahdi writes, in “Lord, It’s Not a Crime,” “Lord of the Unknown, I have hidden the name I desire in a poem like a treasure in a pocket.” And yet, in this anthology, poetry, as well as love and lust, can be a matter of life and death. The pre-Islamic poet Jariyat Human ibn Murra was killed by her enslaver after she uttered the poem published in the book.
Although book brings together writers from across continents and eras, the writing is always tantalizing and never boring. In fact, “We Wrote in Symbols” speaks powerfully to our time of masking and quarantine, desire, and distrust. Egyptian poet and translator of Lucile Clifton, Hiba Moustafa meditates on stolen looks in her poem, “Contemplation,” while Slovak-Palestinian feminist writer khulud khamis dramatizes secrets, shared and unshared, in her short story “At Last.”
Like all great anthologies, We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, offers many portals to enter this magnificent literature. Editor Selma Dabbagh’s thoughtful introduction sets the tone for the whole book: ‘The voices of these writers show how the words of lust and the erotic can remove the barriers between sex and love and illustrate how respect is as essential a component of love as shamelessness can be to sex. These writings provide an eloquent vocabulary to cross from the known to the unknown, exploring infinite possibilities in the way people forge intimate connections, both physically and mentally. If the erotic is partly a mind game, then these writers invite the reader to experience with some of the most sophisticated of players — living, dead, or completely imaginary.”
Besides the literature and the powerful introduction, the book includes a glossary, suggestions for future reading, brief writer biographies, acknowledgements, as well as copyright credits for the wealth of literature We Wrote in Symbols shares.
I dare you to read We Wrote in Symbols and not connect with a writer you want to know more deeply or a work of literature of which you want more.
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