Chapter 8 Reality, representation, resistance: a case study of an Arab cancer ethnodrama

Introduction¹

1.  In her autobiography, A Daughter of Isis (1999),² the late Egyptian feminist and novelist Nawal el-Saadawi gives a brief but heartrending account of her grandmother’s experience with cancer. Writing of the old woman’s unspoken diagnosis and treatment, el-Saadawi notes:

They told her she had influenza and inflamed tonsils. She lay in bed for a whole year. Suffering mixed with sorrow accumulated in her body. The ‘specialist in malignant tumours’ sunk needles in her neck. Her neck was pierced with needles and wound up in gauze, so she could not move her head, but her ash-grey eyes kept moving around her, filled with helpless pain, and her finger pale and ghostlike kept pointing to the needles in her neck. A blurry finger pointing to the blurry mass of white gauze asking the question she could not ask: ‘What is it then that I have in my neck?’.³

2.  In 2004, a novel by Syrian Haifa Bitar entitled Imraa’ min Hadtha al-‘Asr [A Woman of This Modern Age] offered a detailed fictional account of a woman’s experience with breast cancer.⁴ Its publication marked one of the few (if not the first) instances in which a woman writer addresses the experience of breast cancer in ways that are deeply unconventional in the modern Arabic literary tradition. But the well-known male Syrian writer and critic Yassin Refa‘iyah was clearly uncomfortable with the ways in which Bitar’s protagonist, Maryam, articulates her bodily configurations in times of illness. The critic violently argued in one review: ‘This is not how a woman with breast cancer feels!’.⁵

3.  In 2017, during a Q&A session that followed the staging of an ethnodrama based on Arab women’s cancer testimonies entitled Wasafuli al-Sabr [I Am Waiting for You], a young man told the audience present of the anguish that still haunts him at being separated from his mother when the latter was experiencing cancer. The seventeen-year-old man recounted that when he was six years of age, his mother was diagnosed with cancer and his aunts kept the little boy away from her: ‘They hid from me that she was unwell, they did not allow me to go into her room during her treatment and when she was dying I was not permitted to see her even when I cried and called for her. Then she died. I found out years later that my mother had lived with and died of cancer. But no one had said a word at the time’ (23 July 2017).

Why begin this chapter with such random, disparate or fragmentary examples of women’s cancer experiences drawn from creative fiction, real-life testimony and critical reception histories over a period of almost twenty years?

To read these different accounts together, we may begin to see them as episodes in a single story, namely the story of how the Arab world perceives and interprets women’s cancer on the one hand and how it is counted, accounted and discounted. It also becomes clear how literary and socio-cultural representations of cancer are so deeply entangled with one another that it becomes impossible to tell where fiction ends and real life begins. As disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson puts it: ‘Representation informs the identity—and often the fate—of real people with extraordinary bodies’.⁶ In what follows, I want to argue that the account of the cancer experience of el-Saadawi’s grandmother, the breast cancer representation of the protagonist of A Woman of this Modern Age and the young audience member’s recollection of his mother’s cancer experience do not ‘tell the story of Arab women’s cancer’ so much as of its representational silence or absence.

This chapter gives a critical account of work undertaken on my ethnodrama Wasafuli al-Sabr [I Am Waiting for You] (2017), which seeks to explore the modern cultural history of women’s cancer in the Arab world through a creative–critical engagement with fiction, criticism and real-life testimonies. It is my aim to exemplify the complex and multidimensional nature of literary research on the one hand and to underscore the latter’s emancipatory capacity, especially for individuals and communities experiencing marginalisation. To quickly map my argument, the chapter will briefly reflect on the ‘archaeology of silence’ that marks Arab women’s cancer experiences both in Arab society and in the modern Arabic literary tradition. I then highlight how the creative–critical approach this drama employed offered multiple perspectives on the question of speaking about, representing and embodying cancer, while also drawing attention to the social, cultural and political contexts that underpin these literary representations. In summary, the chapter highlights the ways in which the ethnodrama – and the employment of this genre – sought to critique and resist the marginalisation of women’s cancer experience that extends from everyday phenomenological experience to literary and aesthetic representation.

The cancer taboo and silence

In many ways, and as I have shown elsewhere, cancer is perceived as a taboo in the Arab world, especially for women diagnosed with the disease.⁷ If this taboo status has been unsettled in some Arab contexts, thanks to activist efforts and initiatives, the disease remains largely attached to a range of titles that ultimately steer away from mentioning it. To list but a few of the idiomatic placeholders that are still used to name it without naming it, cancer is often referred to as haydek al-marad [that disease]; al-marad al-wehish [the bad or nasty disease]; al-marad al-‘atel [the dreadful or lousy disease]; al-marad illi mabyitsama [the disease not to be named]; and haydek al-shi [that thing]. If cancer is ever explicitly named, it is often in a foreign language: individuals who choose to identify the condition often resort to its French or English names cancre or ‘cancer’.⁸ Yet, as Jackie Stacey posits – in the context of their reflections on what they call the ‘C’ word during their own cancer treatment – the un-naming of cancer is a constant reminder that one has ‘entered stigmatized territory’.⁹ This linguistic evasion confronts us with what the critic calls ‘a deep sense of the horrific’: ‘[…] the terror directed towards people with cancer’ is a clear indication of ‘its taboo status’. For Stacey, ‘what disturbs so deeply […] is something which goes beyond rational or conscious responses, something which threatens most profoundly. We are haunted by the constancy of its tormenting presence and horrified by its particular manifestations’.¹⁰ In Stacey’s account, the ‘power of cancer’s horror is partly due to its association with death’¹¹ but also carries the ‘physical disgust that marks [cancer’s] impact’.¹²

It is important to stress that the linguistic erasure, negation or circumvention of women’s cancer in Arab society extends into, and is mirrored by, Arabic literary representations of cancer. To examine the body of Arabic literary works on women’s cancer – novels, short stories, plays and memoirs – that has been produced since the 1930s is to examine what I have previously called the history of an absence.¹³ This absence stands in sharp contrast to the proliferation of cancer narratives in Western contexts.¹⁴ If there have been a number of attempts to write fictional or autobiographical cancer narratives in more recent years – mainly on breast cancer – relatively limited critical and literary attention has been paid to these works in terms of their contribution to Arab and Arabic cancer narratives more widely or in terms of the insights they could give us to patient subjectivity and affect.¹⁵ In this sense, the history of the absence or silence called ‘cancer’ persists today.

As I have argued elsewhere, this absence at the heart of the representation of women’s cancer experiences is felt in various ways: the sheer lack of cancer narratives and memoirs, the dearth of representations of people with cancer, the failure to explore the subjectivity of those who have cancer and the refusal to even put a name to ‘that disease’ in those narratives where a character has cancer.¹⁶ In many ways, this state of denial is perhaps best captured in el-Saadawi’s words in A Daughter of Isis: ‘No-one dared, no-one could bear to pronounce the word cancer. Death was a word that was easier spoken. When people spoke about cancer they said, “You know, that disease”’.¹⁷

For el-Saadawi herself,¹⁸ as well as for a number of other Arab women writers and poets like the Moroccan writer Leila Hulw, the Egyptians Radwa Ashour¹⁹ and Nemat al-Behairy,²⁰ the Iraqi Salima Saleh²¹ and the Lebanese Nazik Saba Yared,²² Arab women’s cancer experiences have begun to emerge from the margins in recent years in different forms: fiction, autobiography and drama. To take just one of the most provocative contributions to this emerging field, the Syrian writer Haifa Bitar’s Imraa’ min Hadtha al-‘Asr [A Woman of This Modern Age] (2004) offers a detailed account of a woman’s experience with breast cancer, mastectomy and chemotherapy, told against the backdrop of the protagonist’s past relationships with men. It is – to my knowledge – one of the earliest modern Arabic cancer accounts by a woman writer in the Arab world that breaks with the taboo surrounding the theme by addressing the experience of breast cancer in its acute corporeality. As a consequence, the novel was, despite positive reviews, attacked by a number of literary critics and on social media: the literary critic Refa‘iyah (as noted above) argued that the narrative was in no way reflective of women’s experiences of cancer. In order to prove his point, Refa‘iyah compares the portrayal of the protagonist’s experience of breast cancer with his own daughter’s experience of the same disease: the critic revealed that his daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer while she was in her thirties and insisted that when ‘she was ill she did not think of her past, her present or her future’.²³

While I am obviously not in a position to comment on Refa‘iyah’s daughter’s case, his review nonetheless serves – perhaps inadvertently – to highlight a number of key ethical and aesthetic issues surrounding the representation of women’s cancer. To privilege his daughter’s experience of breast cancer over Bitar’s representation of this experience, the critic institutes an opposition and hierarchy between real-life experiences and literary representations, which he evidently perceives as being out of sync with, and inferior to, reality. However, there is at least an argument to be made here that the father’s (Refa‘iyah’s) response to Bitar’s novel says as much about the prevailing patriarchal normative discourses surrounding Arab women’s cancer experiences, as it does about real-life empirical reality. For me, what is at issue here is not proving Refa‘iyah right or wrong but rather exposing or questioning his underpinning normative assumption that there is a right or wrong – good or bad – way of living through the female cancer experience. In seeking to police the boundary between real life and literature, Refa‘iyah’s condemnation of the representation of a woman’s breast-cancer experience in A Woman of this Modern Age ironically trespasses across that boundary: his depiction of a ‘true’ (and, by implication, also a ‘false’) cancer experience is every bit as fictional as the novel he derides.

In short, then, it is difficult, if not impossible, to challenge the culture of silence where Arab women’s cancer experiences and representation are concerned. It is clear that a whole set of violent normative forces – social, gendered, political and religious – come into play in this story that is often of silent suffering. As we are beginning to see, this culture of silence has become so deeply ingrained that Arab women – especially those living outside the metropolis – still find it difficult to speak about their cancer diagnosis and treatment. To reinforce the problem, what we have seen to be the dearth of Arabic cancer accounts – whether literal, historical or autobiographical – makes the task of undertaking a comprehensive cultural archive of cancer representations even more challenging. What, then, might it mean to write a cultural history or genealogy of Arab women’s cancer? How can it confront or overcome the discursive hole or lack at its core? To what extent might creative criticism be one way to fill or supplement that absence?

I Am Waiting for You and creative-critical fusion

In order to at least begin to answer these questions, I now want to turn to my ethnodrama I Am Waiting for You (2017). This play was written as part of a research project on a cultural history of cancer in the Arab world (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their Open World Research Initiative) and was first staged in Beirut, Lebanon, in the summer of 2017 in a production by the renowned Lebanese feminist theatre director Lina Abyad. In subsequent years, it has been performed to the wider public in Lebanon and to medical staff at various hospitals in Lebanon, including the Naef K. Basile Cancer Institute of the American University of Beirut Medical Center and Rizk Hospital, thus marking the first instance in the Arab world in which a play is performed in a hospital space to the medical community.

To offer some brief context, I Am Waiting for You builds on work published in my first monograph The Female Suffering Body: Illness and Disability in Modern Arabic Literature (2014) by seeking to fill, creatively, what that book called the ‘absent presence’ of women’s illness in the Arabic novel. In order to understand and articulate how women in the region experienced cancer phenomenologically, I conducted ethnographic research in the form of a series of interviews with women who have or had cancer – as well as their family members – from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and Palestine.

It will not be surprising to learn by now that most of the women I interviewed had not disclosed their cancer diagnosis to anyone except very close family members. As a matter of fact, certain women even hid their diagnosis from their family and loved ones, thus choosing to live their cancer experience in isolation because of the taboo surrounding the disease. Yet, as one Lebanese woman described the burden of this choice, at the start of the interview: ‘I am tired. Tired of the silence’ (Personal interview, April 2016). If this sentiment was repeated again and again by different interviewees, it should nonetheless be stressed that not everyone I contacted was willing to speak of their experience: requests for interviews were declined, postponed or cancelled at the last minute and, even during the interviews that proceeded, some interviewees found it impossible to speak of their experience or even name their disease. In this sense, every conversation took place against the background of a larger silence – which manifested itself as gaps, pauses and linguistic evasions that uncannily echoed the representations encountered in literary works – and it was this historical, social and literary silence that was the theme of I Am Waiting for You.

If my research sought to investigate Arab women’s real and lived cancer experiences, it soon became clear that any empirical interrogation could not be independent of, and divorced from, the archive of literary and critical representations that, as we have seen, do so much to predetermine what forms that experience will take. To map what Jerome Klinkowitz calls the ‘void’ that lies between and within the archive of literary representations on the one hand and women’s testimonies on the other, I sought to construct an exchange or interaction between (1) Arab women’s testimonies of their cancer experience, (2) literary representations of women’s cancer in modern Arabic literature and (3) the critical reception of those representations. This tripartite model not only enabled me to narrate the entanglement between the lived experience of cancer and the discourses that surround it in Arab societies at large, but also allowed the playscript to supplement and substitute the gaps in these different texts and contexts. In this creative–critical fusion, I found an artistic, methodological and critical medium that made it possible to ‘speak’ the silences in the different fictional and non-fictional accounts of women’s cancer experiences.

What did this process look or sound like on stage? To briefly summarise how the play attempted to capture the testimonies of the women interviewed in dramatic form, I Am Waiting for You stages an encounter between a group of women (and one man) who sit and wait. Some have been waiting for weeks, others for years, still others seem to have been waiting forever. They wait patiently and impatiently, nervously and calmly, hopefully and resignedly. This mise-en-scène sought to capture what I found to be a recurring theme in the stories of the women who agreed to be interviewed. For these interviewees, their cancer experience was principally a form of prolonged waiting: waiting for test results, waiting to start treatment, waiting to finish treatment, waiting for partial or complete remission to be confirmed, waiting for one’s hair to fall out or grow back, waiting for one’s period to stop or return and for one’s body to recuperate; waiting for the cancer to return, waiting to live and (at times) waiting to die.²⁴ In this sense, the ‘you’ in the title I Am Waiting for You remains open: it variously signifies health, illness, life and, indeed, death.

As this complex waiting experience is foregrounded, we also begin to witness how the different characters fill the silence by talking to each other, to themselves and to the space at large.²⁵ Their voices and stories become entangled with, and echoed by, the voices and stories of fictional characters, worlds and representations. To be clear, the playscript juxtaposes the voices of the real women who have or had cancer that I had interviewed with the voices of two literary protagonists who experience cancer in Arabic novels: Bitar’s A Woman of this Modern Age and Betool Khedairi’s Ghayeb [Absent] (2004). It thus created a kind of speculative ‘dialogue’ between Maryam (the cancer patient in Bitar’s A Woman of this Modern Age) and Mona, a real-life Lebanese cancer patient. According to the same logic, Ilham (the Iraqi cancer ‘victim’ who disappears early in Khedairi’s Absent) re-appears in a Beirut waiting room in 2017 and joins forces with the Iraqi actress Namaa al-Ward, who is herself a breast cancer survivor. In addition to these dialogic literary and real encounters, the characters also speak back to the negative literary review of Bitar’s novel.

In bringing real and fictional narratives into dialogue in this way, I Am Waiting for You sought neither to dramatise real-life experience nor to realise drama but to expose the ways in which, once again, cancer experience has always been both fictional and real at the same time. It responds to, and engages with, the anthropologist Stuart McLean’s theory of the imagination as ‘an active component of experience and perception engaged in a constant set of interchange with the material textures of the existing world’.²⁶ Along a similar vein, Dara Culhane also notes in the introduction to the collection A Different Kind of Ethnography that ‘the potentialities of the imagination’ can ‘force an alternative rendering of social lives, one that accounts for the forgotten, disappeared, hidden and lost’.²⁷ To write a work of fiction, as Ronald Sukenick reminds us in their In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction, thus does not mean abandoning the world of fact but rather realising how deeply the stuff of fiction is entrenched in our everyday lives:

The great advantage of fiction over history, journalism, or any other supposedly ‘factual’ kind of writing is that it is an expressive medium. It transmits feeling, energy, excitement. […] No other medium […] can so well deal with our strongest and often most intimate responses to the larger and small facts of our daily lives. No other medium, in other words, can so well keep track of the reality of our experience.²⁸

If cancer itself is defined medically or biologically as ‘an abnormal and uncontrollable division of cells’, as Brian Lobel argues, it is also what we might call an abnormal and uncontrollable division of meaning, of signification, of language: ‘The word cancer quickly spins from being just a thing that happens to cells to being a language that one speaks, either fluently (like most cancer veterans), professionally (like most nurses, doctors and other healthcare staff), or like a new student in a language immersion class (like most of the newly diagnosed)’.²⁹ In I Am Waiting for You, I sought to show how one of the languages that cancer patients, nurses and doctors learn to speak or immerse themselves in is always, and also, the language of fiction.

Resisting silence

In order to resist the silence surrounding Arab women’s cancer, I turned specifically to the genre of drama and I want to explain that choice, too. It is important to begin here with Kathleen Gallagher’s claim that the use of traditional ethnographic methodologies ‘often anchors researchers to only use those things that can be or were spoken in the given context rather than using stories – methodologically – as spaces for exploration and rival musings’. According to this scholar, ethnography’s ‘reductive and appropriating form of reporting’ strips and divests ‘experience of its ambiguities and contradictions’. To restore this symbolic dimension of lived experience, Gallagher turns to theatre: ‘Storytelling through theatre that draws on symbol and metaphor, realism and abstraction can act as a “a methodological release point” to invite the unsaid, the masked, the contested, the contradictory.’³⁰ By ‘methodological release point’ Gallagher is here referring to Sara McClelland and Michele Fine’s notion of the term to speak of ‘the sometimes halting or uneven bursts of understanding that can result from innovative qualitative methodologies’.³¹ If the identities of the women whose stories were told on stage remained anonymised in the play, I believe the dramatic genre enabled them to speak, not simply as a set of qualitative data points, but as embodied beings in all their messy complexity. In representing the ethnographic data through the medium of ethnodrama, I Am Waiting for You was paradoxically better able to do justice to the women’s testimony than any straightforward traditional ethnography.

It is also important to stress that the ethnodrama was underpinned by an (inchoate, at times, but always indisputably present) activist spirit. After all, one of the key tropes that emerged from the individual interviews I conducted was the isolation of many of the women diagnosed with cancer: the taboo that often accompanied the diagnosis, the inability to talk openly about their treatment and the scarcity of support groups available (especially for those living in rural or conflict zones) imposed a corporeal, cultural and linguistic invisibility upon them. To bring these women’s individual stories into conversation with one another in ethnodramatic form, I thus sought to create a virtual network or community of support for the women in question – and for other women with cancer who may see or read the play. By the same token, I think the collective testimonies we staged constituted a kind of virtual activist group or movement that sought to challenge prevailing taboos around women’s cancer experience. In I Am Waiting for You, I tried to conceive of what Gallagher would describe as ‘a place from which to begin inquiry’ rather than ‘a place at which to arrive’:³² the real and fictional stories we put on stage were a forum to invite critical and social questioning of the ways in which we speak, represent and cast women’s cancer experiences.

If I Am Waiting for You was a place to begin inquiry, this inquiry took on a meaning beyond what we had all imagined and hoped for (researcher, theatre director, cast and production team). Its premiere in Beirut in 2017 was fraught with anxieties. As Lobel reminds us, performances about illness (especially cancer) are not a popular subject-matter for the stage and we worried that audiences would simply refuse to attend or respond negatively. For the production team, Lobel’s poignant critique of utopian theories of the theatre as a free democratic space resonated in the days leading up to the premiere: ‘If the world that we live in finds it nearly impossible to embrace difference, fragility or vulnerability, how or why should we expect the theatre to be any better?’.³³ In staging the first play about cancer on an Arab stage, we had no idea what to expect and so were astonished and gratified that the run was a virtual sell-out.

What, then, was the audience response to I Am Waiting for You? To gauge audience reaction, we staged nightly post-performance Q&A sessions and invited spectators to give feedback via a number of identifiable and anonymous means (conversations, emails, sticky notes posted on a board in the foyer). It quickly became clear from both the quality and quantity of the feedback that the play struck an emotional chord with audience members – many of whom were themselves personally affected by cancer and who felt empowered to speak about it publicly for the first time. As the audience gathered around the stage after each performance, stories flowed and attempts to put into words what it has meant and means to be diagnosed with cancer for individuals, family members and carers unfolded. For one middle-aged woman, the play reignited a longstanding sense of guilt she felt over not disclosing her mother’s cancer to friends and family even though the latter’s self-imposed isolation had led to ugly rumours about her character:

I should have defended her and told everyone she was hiding at home for fear of the taboo. And tonight I want to tell everyone who knew and did not know my mother that she had cancer and suffered from cancer and hid because of her cancer but people did not see this and assumed the worst of her. […] They attacked her reputation and moral character! Why? Because she’s a woman! (26 July 2017)

In another post-performance audience gathering, an older man with terminal cancer described how ‘moved’ he felt ‘at being amongst the audience and listening to the accounts of women’s cancer experiences’: ‘I don’t have long to live,’ the man announced, ‘and I won’t be around to see how our society will completely shatter this silence and taboo but I can only say that every story and every testimony has penetrated my very being’ (29 July 2017).

In many ways, the audience reaction to the play testifies to the dramatic transformation of cancer from an isolated or atomised experience to a collective experience: ‘The disease that sets the body apart from others,’ as Arthur Frank observes, ‘becomes, in the story, the common bond of suffering that joins bodies in their shared vulnerability’.³⁴ It also testifies to the power of modern theatre itself to break down the fourth wall that separates the performers from the audience. As Helena Grehan notes: ‘Performance engages its spectators emotionally, viscerally and intellectually. It has the potential to generate a set of conditions within which linguistic or representational surfaces can be disturbed or interrupted in ways that allow spectators to reflect on and ask questions about the nature of any response to work.’³⁵ In the words of Dr Jacques Mokhbat, of LAUMC-Rizk Hospital, the play ‘led us to question ourselves and to reevaluate our approach to patient care and self-education’ (Email, 17 August 2017).

To draw this chapter to a close, though, I want to contend that the audience response – from both the general public and the medical community – testified to what the feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde calls ‘the transformation of silence into language and action’. For Lorde, writing following their own breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, the speech act is also an act of community building:

For every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed bridging our difference … [I]n the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.³⁶

If every speech act is spoken to someone who, in turn, responds with their own speech act, then the response to I Am Waiting for You powerfully embodied this process: the cancer experiences embodied on stage generated a whole set of other stories about cancer experiences from members of the audience. In bearing witness to the creation of a – previously unspoken and inaccessible – archive of collective cancer stories, I Am Waiting for You testified to what Lorde calls – to repeat – ‘the transformation of silence into language and action’.

Conclusion

To close, I recall the testimony of one of the women I interviewed whose first reaction upon learning of her cancer diagnosis was a strong desire to read about women’s cancer – not in medical textbooks or on internet sites but in literary works, fiction and drama such as the texts discussed in this chapter. By reading about other women’s experiences of cancer in this way, this particular young woman not only found a community of fellow cancer patients who simply did not exist in her own experience, but also a common language, imaginary and structure of feeling that paradoxically spoke more eloquently to her than her own raw or immediate experience of shock or trauma. In this way, the woman felt that her individual hermeneutic response to her cancer diagnosis was, from the beginning, mediated or refracted through this larger literary and cultural archive of other women (Personal interview, May 2016).

To answer the question of why literary research ‘matters’ – which this collection invites us to do – this chapter has argued that my ethnodrama I Am Waiting for You both describes and (quite literally) performs the power of the ‘literary’ – whether creative, critical or otherwise – to recover an archive of silent and silenced voices, to resist histories of silence and to find the words through which to tell the story of this past and present silence. It endeavours to participate in and expand a virtual community of support and empathy where all of us ‘recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives’.³⁷ In challenging both a general and a specialised (medical) public to confront existing taboos around women’s cancer, I also hope that my ethnodrama played some small role in enabling Arab women to speak ‘that disease’ with its proper name.

In this chapter, I have also sought to show that what we call ‘Arab women’s cancer’ is itself a creative and critical work or labour that occupies a kind of middle ground between phenomenology and hermeneutics, experience and discourse, life and fiction. To ask the question of why literary research matters – at least as far as Arab women’s cancer is concerned – is thus to approach the ‘matter’ from the wrong way around: what we call the real, lived or material experience of cancer is always already informed by, and entangled with, the literary in all its diverse forms. If I may return to the example of the woman with the cancer diagnosis I described above, I find it striking that her own cancer experience – her way of narrating her trauma to herself – effectively took the form of a kind of ‘literary research’. In seeking to find the, so-called, real-world uses or value of literature in a world that is allegedly post-literary, we discover that there is, perhaps, already more literature in real life than we ever knew.

Notes

1.   This chapter uses he/she to refer to individuals whose self-identified pronouns are known. I also use male/female adjectives where relevant and appropriate. When I refer to individuals whose identified pronouns are not known or when the gender of a person is irrelevant within the context, I use the singular ‘they’.

2.   This is one of the translations of el-Saadawi’s three-volume autobiography which first appeared in Arabic as Awraq Hayati.

3.   Nawal El-Saadawi, A Daughter of Isis: The Early Life of Nawal El Saadawi (Zed Books, 2009), trans. by Sherif Hetata, p. 208.

4.   I use a general system of translation and only use the ayn (‘) and hamza (’). I also present all Arabic names and titles of people, places and texts in the form most familiar to an English-speaking audience and/or the form used by the writers and the works under discussion.

5.   Yassin Refa‘iyah, ‘al-Ghiwaya fi Hudn al-Mawt’, al-Mustaqbal, 14 January 2004, p. 20.

6.   Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 15.

7.   Abir Hamdar, ‘Staging Silence: Arab Women’s Cancer Experience’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 41.2 (2021), pp. 197–211, doi:10.1080/14682761.2019.1683348.

8.   Hamdar, ‘Staging Silence’, p. 197.

9.   Jackie Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (Routledge, 2013), p. 70.

10.   Stacey, Teratologies, p. 72.

11.   Stacey, Teratologies, pp. 72–3.

12.   Stacey, Teratologies, p. 74.

13.   Abir Hamdar, The Female Suffering Body: Illness and Disability in Modern Arabic Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2014).

14.   Mary K. DeShazer, Fractured Borders: Reading Women’s Cancer Literature (University of Michigan Press, 2010).

15.   One early exception is Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s essay on Moroccan Leila Hulw’s Fa La Tansa Allah [Do Not Forget God] (1984).

16.   See, for example, Egyptian Mahmoud Taymur’s 1969 novella Wa Usdila al-Sitar [And the Curtain is Lowered] and Yusuf al-Siba‘i’s 1969 two-volume novel Nahnu La Nazra‘ al-Shawk [We Do Not Sow Thorns], both of which depict women protagonists who suffer from a disease – the suggestion being cancer – but this disease is never identified or named.

17.   El-Saadawi, A Daughter of Isis, p. 208.

18.   See Daughter of Isis and her short story ‘La Shaya’ Yafna’ [Nothing Perishes] (1986).

19.   See Athqal min Radwa: Maqati‘ min Sira Thatiyya [Heavier than Radwa: Excerpts from an Autobiography] (2013).

20.   See Yawmiyat Imraa’ Mushi‘a [Chronicles of a Radiating Woman] (2006).

21.   See Aam al-Saratan [The Year of the Cancer] 2017.

22.   See Taqasim ‘ala Watarin da‘i’ [Improvisations on a Missing String] (1997).

23.   Refa‘iyah, ‘al-Ghiwaya fi Hudn al-Mawt’, p. 20.

24.   Hamdar, ‘Staging Silence’, pp. 201–2.

25.   Hamdar, ‘Staging Silence’, p. 201.

26.   Stuart McLean, ‘Introduction: Why Imagination?’, Irish Journal of Anthropology, 10.2 (2007), pp. 5–9 (p. 6).

27.   Dara Culhane, ‘Imagining: An Introduction’, in A Different Kind of Ethnography ed. by Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane (University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 1–21 (p. 13).

28.   Ronald Sukenick, In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), p. 242.

29.   Brian Lobel, Theatre & Cancer (Red Globe Press, 2019), p. 10.

30.   Kathleen Gallagher, Why Theatre Matters: Urban Youth, Engagement, and a Pedagogy of the Real (University of Toronto Press, 2014), p. 16.

31.   Gallagher, Why Theatre Matters, p. 16.

32.   Gallagher, Why Theatre Matters, p. 16.

33.   Lobel, Theatre & Cancer, pp. 10–11.

34.   Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 2nd edn, p. xix.

35.   Helena Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 2.

36.   Audre Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984), pp. 40–4 (p. 41 and p. 43).

37.   Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence’, p. 43.

References