Title: Patriarchy and War in Liana's Badr's the Eye of the Mirror
Abstract: The truth sometimes shocks, or shakes the tranquility of set ideas. But sometimes a good shake can awaken minds that rest in slumber, and open eyes to see what is really happening around them. (El Saadawi :1980: 3) This paper examines, through women's literature, the impact of patriarchy and war on women, their traumatic experiences, their roles during the war, and how war can blur the gender-specific boundaries by creating a space for to negotiate their survival and participate more actively in society. In Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror, the heroine is victimized by both patriarchy and war. Badr's novel can be read as a deconstruction of the dominant national male narrative by rendering a counter discourse empowers and chronicles their experiences during war would, otherwise, have been forgotten. In other words, by inscribing their experiences and roles in war into a war story, writers counter those who try to marginalize their war experiences (Cooke : 1994). In The Eye of the Mirror, we find Aisha struggling to assert her own identity by negating her own body as a form of resistance against the social traditions and oppressive mores tend to suppress her as a woman. Simultaneously she strives to survive and preserve her own life and the lives of others around her during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), (1) where her husband, Hassan, is killed and her home is shelled during the siege of camp Tal Ezza'tar. (2) According to Claire Buck, Liana Badr's fictional works revolve around women and war, and exile and the plight of facing not only the national enemy but a massed weight of inhuman traditions and a heritage of male oppression. (1992: 311). Put differently, Badr's literary corpus is concerned the mutual struggles of Palestinian and men in exile for survival against the ravages of war portraying how fighting for survival bolsters not only their unity but also transforms gender relationships (Shaaban: 1988). Here, one may say that Badr has been keen to situate women's experiences at the centre of the nationalist struggle not only to record and chronicle the survival of Palestinian people but to keep their identity from disintegration. However, Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror specifically sheds light on the plight of thousands of Palestinian living in exile in refugee camps in Lebanon after being expelled from their historical homeland, in pre-1948 Palestine (Pappe:2006). (3) For example, Aisha symbolizes the trauma of Palestinian living in exile marginalized by society and displaced nationally. Within this context, Fadia Faqir states in her introduction to Badr's The Eye of the Mirror that Aisha is marginalized as a young girl in a society with very fixed definitions of what womanhood entails, and also as a Palestinian who is homeless and whose entire nation has been displaced. (1994:7) (4) Since early childhood, Aisha has been confined to a Christian convent where she receives her education in return for working as a servant there and later on in her father's house where she is not allowed to move freely due to patriarchal social restrictions imposed by her obsessive and abusive father, Assayed. Nevertheless, we see Aisha develop a kind of self control mechanism to resist patriarchal and political submission. She creates an imaginative space for herself where she can protect herself from her own dual social and political alienation. Her own self protection is motivated by divorcing reality from the imaginative world where she seeks for her own self a protective shelter. As long as suppressive patriarchal culture and social mores remain in place, the transformed individual woman will be alienated.(Cooke: 1994).This can be noticed in Aisha's emotional tension and bodily reactions in her endeavor to survive her own dual alienation in a patriarchal society tends to erase her own identity and rob her of her human freedom, patriarchal attitudes and practices which privilege men, continue to permeate African societies from the level of the family up to the state (Gordon 1996:7) (5), and a political situation perceives her as a Palestinian refugee who may pose a political threat to the sectarian political system in Lebanon, a threat has to be confined and finally eliminated. …
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
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