Two very different female figures from Arab cultural and literary history structure Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma Authorship and the Diaspora in Arab Women's Writings—Shahrazad (Scheherazade) and the mawʾūdah (the buried infant girl). Hanadi Al-Samman's study uses these figures and the tropes they activate—female infanticide by burial and women's storytelling traditions—to read a range of fictional works by contemporary Arab women authors, all of Syrian and Lebanese origin, who write in Arabic but live in the diaspora (Paris and London). Al-Samman states that her “paramount goal” in Anxiety of Erasure is “an examination of how diaspora Arab women writers activate these two tropes to reflect the endless possibilities of death and rebirth, of social and political engagement, in order to ignite a revolution on the personal and political levels” (9). She further explains that her intention in amplifying these women's voices it to reclaim the corpus of “their foremother Shahrazad through revisiting the traumatic sites of the pre-Islamic waʾd tradition” (13).
The book opens with three relatively short introductory chapters: the first sets up the mawʾūdah and Shahrazad as, in Al-Samman's words, “icons of erasure and revolutionary resurrection;” the second is an overview of Arab women writers and the diaspora experience, including North and South America in addition to Europe; and the third looks at how these figures help to understand Arab women's authorship as trauma and working against “erasure.” The five chapters that follow are more detailed readings of novels by Ghada Samman, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamida Naʿnaʿ, Hoda Barakat and Salwa al-Neimi. The last of these discusses Neimi's poetry as well as two novels. The book's very interesting postscript briefly discusses the work of Samar Yazbek.
The book is well structured and argued, offering rich readings of these texts that benefit greatly not only from the framework Al-Samman develops but also her large, expansive, and deep engagement with Arabic religious texts, including the Qurʾan, classical Arabic literature, popular traditions, and storytelling. The rich body of knowledge that Al-Samman commands and integrates into her analyses is woven into the substance of her arguments. This makes the framework of the dual tropes of Shahrazad and the waʾd tradition more plausible in those moments when it does seem somewhat strained. Al-Samman defines these tropes as flexible by definition and uses them in interesting ways, but at times it can be somewhat difficult to follow how particular books and passages connect to them. Reading the entire book together, however, makes clearer how its argument and framework is built, and it gathers strength chapter after chapter.
These potential problems of argumentation and theoretical framework are far outweighed by the creativity in the way Anxiety of Erasure connects its textual readings to larger social and political frameworks. As such, the work is a solid academic study—suitable for teaching Arabic literature at the graduate level and Arab women's literature to undergraduates. It could be useful to pair some of the chapters with the novels they discuss in a classroom setting, for example. Aside from questions of editing—a number of typographical errors and similar problems—the book is well written and easy to read. Moreover, its larger argument is one that is urgent in many classrooms today: Al-Samman insists that her analyses not be used to discuss women fighting “the veil” or vague notions of women's oppression, but rather to think about women authors as political actors, shapers of contemporary Arab culture and society, and that we must focus on the real issues Arab women authors themselves have chosen to write about.
Al-Samman's work can be situated within scholarship on Arab women's literature. Examples include other works in the Syracuse University Press series in which it is published, Gender, Culture and Politics in the Middle East. It certainly is related to works like, Abir Hamdar's The Female Suffering Body: Illness and Disability in Modern Arabic Literature (2014) and Brinda Mehta's Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women's Writing (2007). In many ways, because of its strong focus and analysis of autobiography, it also engages with Nuwar Al-Hassan Golley's edited collection in that same series, Arab Women's Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing (2007). It is also interesting to think about Anxiety of Erasure in conversation with books about diasporic writers, for example, Sirine Hout's Post-War Lebanese Anglophone Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). This is all the more true because most such works only look at texts not written in Arabic, whereas Al-Samman focuses only on texts written in Arabic.
Anxiety of Erasure is at its most powerful when it takes up politics directly; its strongest chapters are those that analyze works connected to Syria and Syrian writers. The chapter on The Homeland (Al-watan fil-ʿaynayn) by Hamida Naʿnaʿ is one of the most interesting. It offers ways to think about women's roles as activists who shape political movements, and what happens to them when they leave the struggle. Al-Samman's writing is particularly compelling when she connects this book—most prominently in the postscript—to the life and death struggles of people in Syria today. She argues for the importance of reading literature in its political context and how literature fights against injustice and oppression. She states this in the final pages by linking the personal to the political: “At the hands of contemporary diaspora women writers, the Shahrazad of today is not interested in liberating women from real or imaginary veils; rather, she is determined to demolish the walls of local and global oppression that silence Arab females and males alike” (254). Anxiety of Erasure is thus the kind of book we need today—both because we need more studies that focus on women's texts and struggles and also because these must be linked together in order to actualize the political possibilities of literature and how we read it.
