Gender

Translating (Arabic) women writers is a choice related not only to the cultural and literary context, but also to the sociopolitical context. Until recently, the visibility of women has generally been lower than that of men, but the case of Arabic women reflects a somewhat paradoxical situation, since instead of aiming to increase the visibility of a specific creative sector, the objective appears rather to promote orientalist or exotic images, the colonial motto of “saving women” living in Arab/Islamic societies a powerful marketing element. However, as Lila Abu-Lughod (2013) categorically states in her book Do Muslim women need saving?, Muslim (and Arabic) women do not need to be saved because they have their own agency and agenda. Abu-Lughod outlines the fine line between criticism and Orientalism: while criticism of society can be stimulating and positive, it should not be confused with Islamophobia or other political goals.

Egyptian Latifa al-Zayyat is one of the most important writers and feminists in the Arab world, and has been translated into several languages. Publishing houses have made different decisions regarding the translation of titles and choice of book covers. Al-Zayyat’s (1992) autobiography Awraq shakhsiyya (Personal papers) is a case in point. While the Spanish title Notas personales is quite literal, the 1996 English title The search: personal papers is more creative. The 1996 Italian translation added the word “feminist”: Carte private di una feminist (see Loutfi s.a.). In the Catalan translation (Al-Zayyat 1999) by Dolors Cinca, a radical change was made, and the book was entitled Diari d’una feminista (Diary of a feminist). Moreover, the cover of the Catalan edition shows

Translating the Neighbour 203 the barrel of a gun from which a red lipstick emerges, presumably to attract potential readers, even though the book contains no reference to firearms or makeup.

It is therefore clear that the translation of Moroccan women authors is approached differently compared with the translation of male authors and the rest of Arabic literature. According to Mohamed Berrada (2008:236), after independence Moroccan women saw a greater need to use their own voice to raise awareness of the issues that concerned them. Fatema Mernissi (1940-2015) is undoubtedly the best-known. Educated in France and the USA, she is one of the most prestigious Moroccan intellectuals both at home and abroad. Her books are a personal mixture of sociological essays and memoirs that have been hugely successful. Though Mernissi wrote some of her books in Arabic, her memoir The harem within: tales of a Moroccan girlhood (Mernissi 1994) first appeared in English and was translated into Arabic in 1997. Other works such as Le harem et l’occident (Mernissi 2001) were published in French, ensuring rapid diffusion throughout Europe. Although her publications have succeeded in eliminating prejudices and disseminating a less stereotyped image of Arab women, Mernissi’s translations conform to the conventions of Orientalism, as shown in the choice of titles that suggest landscapes of harems, veils and odalisques (as though these are the only topics Arab women can write about). As Anastasia Valassopoulos (2007:133) points out, particularly with regard to Arab women writing in French, it is possible “that women writers use the legacy of exotisme in order to interrogate the discourse from within, whilst at the same time immersing themselves in it”. Mernissi’s work, based on her academic research on Moroccan women, has been disseminated widely, and because she has not sought to win battles against the ‘Occident’, she has been able to offer an open and conciliatory idea of (Islamic) feminism showing that Western women have their own harems and their own restrictions, such as the obligation to fit into small-sized clothes.

Another pioneer of Moroccan feminism, Khnata Bennouna (b. 1940), was translated into Spanish by Guadalupe Sáiz Muñoz in the early 1990s (but has not yet been translated into other languages). Bennouna writes about female characters and their feelings, aspirations and frustrations (Amo 2000:38).

Further academic or personal initiatives have made other genres well-known (poetry or short stories) in addition to the novel. Two examples are Zoubida Boughaba Maleem’s (2003) collection of popular stories of the Rif, and Antonio Reyes Ruiz’s (2007) anthology of Moroccan women’s poetry. However, these books have had a restricted distribution in specialised circles: despite their value, they have not yet reached the general public.

Not all women authors write in Arabic. The former colonial languages are still central in making Maghreb literature visible, especially whenworks are written from the diaspora. As noted by González Navarro and Fernández Parrilla (2019:303):

In the 21st century Moroccan women enjoy a new phenomenon of recognition, for instance through translation into other languages. More important, a new generation of transcultural Moroccan female writers in the diaspora has also begun to win recognition (inside and outside of Morocco) and even to win prestigious literary prizes in their countries of residence, and in their various languages of writing.

Two paradigmatic cases are those of Leila Slimani (writing in French) and Laila Lalami (writing in English) who are much better known than their colleagues who write in Arabic. Leila Slimani (b. 1981) won the Goncourt prize in 2016 with Chanson douce (Slimani 2016), which was translated into Spanish as Canción dulce (Slimani 2017a) and into Catalan as Una dolça cançó (Slimani 2017b), as well as (twice) into English. Cabaret Voltaire also published two more of Slimani’s books dealing with sex: her essay Sexo y mentiras, la vida sexual en Marruecos (Slimani 2018) was translated into English as Sex and lies: sex life in Morocco (Slimani 2020), and her novel En el jardín del ogro (Slimani 2019a) was translated the same year as Adele: a novel (Slimani 2019b). It is difficult to discern whether the publisher’s aim is to denounce society’s hypocrisy in relation to women and sex—which is certainly the case—or whether it also feeds the sexual mystery associated with Arab women (the novel’s protagonist is a woman addicted to sex), or perhaps moves between the two. Readers’ preferences and publisher’s profits are also relevant. Born in Morocco but educated in French, in 2017 Slimani was chosen by President Emmanuel Macron as personal representative to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, a significant event in terms of the relationship between language, literature and gender.

Laila Lalami (b. 1968) is another example of the richness of Moroccan literature written by women. This Moroccan American novelist was born in Rabat and moved to the USA after completing her PhD in the United Kingdom. She writes in English, ensuring a wide audience. Her work Hope and other dangerous pursuits (Lalami 2005) was translated into Spanish as Esperanza y otros sueños (Lalami 2008), but her acclaimed novel The Moor’s account (Lalami 2014)— which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer prize in fiction in 2014 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015—has not yet been translated into Spanish. This is probably because of the latter’s political implications: it is a historical novel narrated by a fictional Moroccan slave accompanying the conqueror and coloniser Pánfilo Narvaez on his sixteenth-century expedition to Florida, the first major European land claim.