It is hard to avoid being completely captivated by Joumana Haddad’s words. Her passionate and honest engagement with the female condition in the Arabic world alone makes her an outstanding voice in journalism and literature. But the fury of her prose conceals something that speaks to every woman, even the ones that live far away from Middle-Easterner's standards, in supposedly open-minded and tolerant societies. Yet, she is not easy to read. She confronts us, Westerners and Orientals, open- and narrow-minded, educated and non-educated, allegedly free and assertedly subdued. She questions all positions, provokes all beliefs and looks us straight in the eyes, making us feel naked in front of her sincere gaze. That naturalness is probably what makes her unique.
A poet and the cultural page editor of the Lebanese daily An-Nahar, she started publishing Jasad in 2008, an erotic magazine addressed to women readers, with articles by intellectuals and poets about masturbation, homosexuality, fetishism, and polygamy alongside antique photos of nude Arab boys luxuriating in voluptuous Ottoman settings and close-ups of female genitalia. None of this sounds outrageously provocative for Western standards, but is guaranteed to irritate several sectors of her society, especially with a woman behind it. Soon after the publication of the first issue, Jasad has earned Haddad attention and accolades but also threats of death, rape, and acid to the face. Despite the threatens, she continues working and living in Lebanon, a courageous choose if we consider “Beirut was bombed by Israel as recently as 2006, is home to Hezbollah and murderous internal politics”. A definitely dangerous place to be “the most hated woman in Lebanon”, as one article recently described her.
Educated by strict Christian values, she grew up during Lebanon’s bloody civil war. But she insists that sex, not war, shaped her destiny. In one of her books, she describes a steamy Beirut afternoon in 1982. A bored, bookish 12-year-old trapped at home with her family, she had just ended a Balzac and was scanning her father’s shelves for a new find. A yellow tome near the ceiling caught her eye: it was “Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue” by the Marquis de Sade. She calls Sade her “baptism by subversion”.
One wonders where sexual politics fits into the setting of current Middle-Eastener female situation. “People tell me,’There are so many things wrong with the Arab world, why do you just talk about sex?’ And I say, ‘This is the main link. Who decides what is allowed and not allowed? The religious figures. They are linked with the political powers, and together they work to control the society through this medium, the sex drive. If you break the power over sex, you can start undermining and questioning the religious and political powers. You cannot do it the other way around.”
Despite her courageous publishings and her passionate involvement with the female situation, Haddad is not considered a feminist leader in her own country, not least because she has publicly rejected the label. As an independent thinker, she criticizes many of feminism’ s principles and dogmas, and calls for destruction to the ground of what being an Arab woman means, by whatever standards that may mean something.
If you are interested in learning more about her, don’t miss our coming articles in the section · [ Azar reads ] · We will be commenting Joumana Haddad’s “I killed Scheherazade. Confessions of an angry Arab woman” and “The return of Lilith”. We consider both works shape her poetics concerning women’s condition and her own particular views on feminism at the best.
