Desert Voices: Bedouin Women's Poetry in Saudi Arabia (Library of Modern Middle East Studies)

257 Pages·2009·1.56 MB·English

by  Moneera Al-Ghadeer

Professor Moneera Al-Ghadeer received her Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature from the University of California at Berkeley and is now an
Associate Professor in the Department of African Languages and
Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research is
highly interdisciplinary and includes postcolonial studies, feminist
philosophy, literary theory and literary translation. She has received a
number of fellowships and awards from the University of California at
Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin, Madison along with a
postdoctoral fellowship from Emory University.
L M M E S
IBRARY OF ODERN IDDLE AST TUDIES
Selected titles: for a full list of titles see www.ibtauris.com/LMMES
25. Religion, Culture and Politics in Iran: 69. Imagining the Arab Other:
From the Qajars to Khomeini How Arabs and Non-Arabs View Each Other
Joanna de Groot Tahar Labib
978 1 86064 571 6 978 1 84511 384 1

39. Tormented Births: Passages to Modernity 71. The Zaza Kurds of Turkey:
in Europe and the Middle East A Middle Eastern Minority in a Globalised Society
Isam Al-Khafaji Mehmed S. Kaya
978 1 86064 976 9 978 1 84511 875 4

73. The Arab-Israeli Conflict in the Media:
41. Women and Media in the Middle East:
Producing Shared Memory and National Identity
Power through Self-Expression
in the Global Television Era
Naomi Sakr
Tamar Ashuri
978 1 85043 485 6
978 1 84511 814 3
44. Human Rights in Arab Thought: A Reader
74. Desert Voices: Bedouin Women’s Poetry in Saudi Arabia
Salma K. Jayyusi (ed.)
Moneera Al-Ghadeer
978 1 85043 707 9
978 1 84511 666 8

51. Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict
76. Satellite Realms:
Muhsin al-Musawi
Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East
978 1 84511 070 3 Naomi Sakr

978 1 86064 688 1
52. Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and

Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf 78. Israeli Cinema:
Paul Dresch and James Piscatori (eds) East/West and the Politics of Representation
978 1 85043 971 4 Ella Shohat

978 1 84511 312 4
57. Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in
the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World 79. Occidentalism in Turkey: Questions of Modernity and
Lina Khatib National Identity in Turkish Radio Broadcasting
978 1 84511 192 2 Meltem Ahiska
978 1 84511 653 8
58. Negotiating Change:
The New Politics of the Middle East 80. Narrating Islam:
Jeremy Jones Interpretations of the Muslim World in European Texts
Gerdien Jonker and Shiraz Thobani (eds)
978 1 84511 269 1
978 1 84511 978 2
61. The Making of Jordan:
83. The Emergence of Modern Istanbul:
Tribes, Colonialism and the Modern State
Transformation and Modernisation of a City
Yoav Alon
Murat Gül
978 1 84511 138 0
978 1 84511 935 5

62. Identity Politics in the Middle East:
84. Beyond Islam:
Liberal Thought and Islamic Challenge in Egypt
A New Understanding of the Middle East
Meir Hatina
Sami Zubaida
978 1 84511 135 9
978 1 84885 069 9

63. The New Voices of Islam: 85. The New Arab Journalist:
Reforming Politics and Modernity – A Reader Mission and Identity in a Time of Change
Mehran Kamrava (ed.) Jeremy Ginges and Laurence Pintak
978 1 84511 274 5 978 1 84885 098 9

68. Arab Media and Political Renewal: 86. Reclaiming Women’s Rights in Islam:
Community, Legitimacy and Public Life The Challenge to Muslim Patriarchy
Naomi Sakr (ed.) Hanaan Balala
978 1 84511 433 6 978 1 84885 118 4
DESERT VOICES
Bedouin Women’s Poetry in
Saudi Arabia

MONEERA AL-GHADEER

TAURIS ACADEMIC STUDIES
an imprint of
I.B.Tauris Publishers
·
LONDON NEW YORK
Published in 2009 by Tauris Academic Studies, an imprint of I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © 2009 Moneera Al-Ghadeer

The right of Moneera Al-Ghadeer to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,
may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Library of Modern Middle East Studies 74

ISBN: 978 1 84511 666 8

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress catalog card: available

Printed and bound in India by Thomson Press
from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by Oxford Publishing Services, Oxford
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Note on Transliterations xi
Introduction 1
1. Reading the Nomadic Voices 9
Literary Sources and the Exclusion of Women’s Poetry 9
Ancient Traces 23
Nomadic Voices 28
Rhetoric of Love 35
2. Melancholic Desire 39
Melancholy from Europe to Arabia and Back 39
The Melancholy of Desire 48
Grief and Gender Grievance 62
3. A Malady of Grief 71
Mourning Like Desert Animals 78
A Desert Lost 94
4. Masquerading Tropes: The Fiction of Face and Voice 105
Speaking to ‘Abandonment of Death’ 113
Unravelling Loss 121
5. Technology and Postcoloniality: Algeria and Arabia 129
Ambivalence and the Radiophonic Voice 133
Instrumental Technology: Fantasy and Conflict 138
Dying to Travel in a Motorcar 148
Feminine Desire and Technology 157
vi CONTENTS
6. The Translatability of the Nomadic 167
Translation Theory and Bedouin Women’s Poetry 168
Bedouin Ethos and the Untranslatable 176
Translation and the Metaphor of Modernity 189
Notes 195
Bibliography 231
Index 241
Acknowledgements
My memory travels in time and space and gathers many debts as I
attempt to remember, acknowledge and express thanks for every
gesture of generosity. Recalling the early stages of this project at the
Department of Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley, I am grateful
to James Monroe, who provoked my research, propelling me to
explore whether Bedouin women’s poetry does not actually exist and
to destabilize the prevalent assumptions. As a patient and attentive
mentor, he inspired and guided my earlier research and continued to
offer indefatigable support during the writing of this book. I also wish
to thank Ann Smock for her eloquent and astute remarks on the draft
of Chapter 1. The encouraging words of Richard Hutson awakened my
motivation when there was none.
For the generous institutional support of this project, I would like to
thank the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and its director, Martine
Watson Brownley, at Emory University for providing me with a Mellon
postdoctoral fellowship during the academic year 2003–2004. I
gratefully acknowledge the graduate school research fellowship at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison for summer research funding in 2005.
My debts are enormous and weigh heavy in this fleeting recol-
lection. I am grateful for Leila Abu Lughod’s invigorating comments
and intellectual questions after a meticulous reading of the first draft
of this manuscript. Her vital remarks guided my revision. I must also
thank Mary Layoun, whose intellectual and affirmative conversations
made it possible to complete this book; Harold Scheub for his
generous reading of various drafts; Muhsin al-Musawi for his enthu-
siastic support of this study; and Gilles Bousquet for providing
institutional support and collaborating with the College of Letters and
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Science at UW-Madison to provide me with a semester off to finish
the manuscript.
Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared in a special issue of symploke
titled ‘Cinema without Borders’ (volume 15, nos 1 and 2, Summer
2008). Also, I gratefully acknowledge my colleagues who invited me to
present different chapters of this book at MEALAC, Columbia
University; the Department of African Languages and Literature, UW-
Madison; the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies,
Emory University; and the Department of Comparative Literature,
University of Michigan.
My numerous conversations with Tarek El-Ariss helped me rethink
and rewrite my argument. Karen McLaughlin’s careful and positive
comments on Chapter 2 were greatly appreciated. Tejumola Olaniyan’s
comments provided the allusive nuance to explore some of the chapters’
enquiries. I thank Shireen R. K. Patell for her insightful and rigorous
remarks on the first draft of Chapter 1. In my constant nomadic
voyages, I learnt from numerous insights, stimulating reflections, sincere
excitement and sometimes disquieting fascination about Bedouin
women’s lyrics. The forceful enthusiasm I encountered urged me to
send off this manuscript.
In translating the poems, I faced a number of lyrical, cultural and
vernacular challenges that I could not have overcome without the
eloquent and sensitive suggestions provided by James Monroe, Michael
Sells, Meriam Cooke, Kevin Barrett, Christopher Larkosh, Deirdre
Flynn and Jeff Fort, among many readers. I am deeply grateful and
indebted to them for their valuable suggestions and fine-tuning of the
translation.
I am immensely grateful to my mother, who sang the desert’s prosody
and captured traces of its tones. She endured my absence and watched
over my solitude during a long nomadic experience in America.
Note on Transliterations
The transliteration of Arabic words follows the Library of Congress
transliteration system, with several important exceptions. To maintain
the aural integrity of the Bedouin poetry, I have transliterated some of
its words and references according to the dialectical pronunciations
(for example, ‘q’ is pronounced ‘g’ in the local Bedouin dialect). I tried
to maintain clarity and systematic approach to transliterating these
words without going into other dialectical variations that this poetry
exemplifies.
In all cases where I quoted from another author’s work, I retained
the author’s original transliteration. Generally, in cases of place and
proper names with commonly accepted spellings in English, I have
utilized the standard English spellings.