Re-thinking Literary Space in Huda Barakat’s the Stone of Laughter

Abstract

The Arab woman not only has contributed to the changing of the contemporary Arab literature but also has used her pen in times of wars and conflicts as a kind of resistance. Nawal Saadawi says: “does anything more than danger stimulate our creativity? And does anything threaten our creativity more than danger?” (N. Saadawi, 1996:157). In her article “Mapping Peace”, the literary critic Miriam Cooke claims that women have a stake in interpreting their war experiences. In fact, writing during war time is an experience that is part of war itself, an experience that informs the socio-political roles that precede it. The Lebanese, the Palestinian, and most recently the Iraqi women writers are vivid, genuine representatives of what a woman can create during times of war, how she can re-shape her experience of war and which portrait she can give to this experience. Hanane Sheikh, Sahar Khalifah, Mai Ghoussoub and Huda Barakat’s writings are instances of the Arab woman’s creativity in moments of conflicts, of wars and of danger. Women’s war literature allows the intolerable to be written because women do not take part in wars with arms but rather with their pens, their voices and their intellects. In fact, women writers subvert time, space and thus history to create their own world and their own records. This trend of Arab literature is viewed as an authoritative tool against the violence of war and as a passive resistance. It is also authoritative in terms of representing space and time as reshaped by wars. Contemporary Arab women writers have shown a big interest of creativity in writing novels, poems and short stories that lucidly portray the transformations war brings, and they have also shown a genuine capacity of subverting moments of war and transforming war time into moments of creation and metamorphosis. The present paper unveils Arab women writers’ genuine ability in creating a narrative space and a narrative time that is proper to moments of wars through their literary writings. Huda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter is going to be our corpus as it represents a vivid depiction of the Lebanese Civil War, and “the best novel written about the Lebanese civil war.”