A Literary Heroine of Selected Fictional War Narratives by Arab Women Writers

Abstract

The destructive power of armed conflicts within the Middle Eastern region provided thematic material for several important works by Arab female writers. The specific modality of these historical events is carried by the female characters that create these fictional narratives. In our contribution, we will focus on the main aspects of the modelling of the female protagonist in prose works, thematising the war in Lebanon, Iraq and Kuwait. We examine to what extent the position of the female protagonist of the fictional war worlds is identical to the one attributed to her by the mainstream discourse, which often overlooks the participation of women in conflicts or records it as the participation of a monolithic “silenced” group, situated on the edge.

From a spatial perspective, we are interested in how female characters in fictional spaces are positioned in relation to the epicentre of war. In the case of literary heroines in the discussed works, it is the prevailing need to “remain”, “endure” and “bear witness”, which is presented as one of the options for confronting a culture of violence. In the classification of the protagonists of these works, we focus on the manner in which they are created in terms of their (active/passive) “participation” in armed conflicts, drawing on a study by I. O. Tijani (2008) as a basis for the classification.