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Redefining the margins: Embodiedknowledge in 'ali and a spinner too?'HASNA LEBBADYPublished online: 01 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: HASNA LEBBADY (2003) Redefining the margins: Embodied knowledgein 'ali and a spinner too?', Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 12:2, 131-140, DOI:10.1080/1066992032000130594

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Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies(Fall 2003), 12(2), 131–140

Redefining the Margins: EmbodiedKnowledge in ‘Ali and a SpinnerToo?’HASNA LEBBADY*

The traditional Moroccan women who told the tale of ‘Ali and a Spinner Too?’1

to a large extent were excluded from the public sphere—which included theworld of books and writing. The marginal position of these women within theirsociety meant that they could not travel to university centers such as that in Fezto acquire the learning associated with the written word and thus to becometheologians and jurists. Rather, they were left to learn what they could at home.However, these women managed to transform the houses in the medina intoveritable centers of cultural production, not only through such activities asembroidery and cooking, but also through the narratives with which they becameinvolved. These women both conformed to and also contested the structureswithin which they found themselves, through their tales, which form part of theoral rather than the written tradition. A tale such as ‘Ali and a Spinner Too?’demonstrates that these women had more agency and wit than the image of themeek and harem-bound stereotype of the Muslim woman often projected byOrientalists. The way the woman in this tale takes control of her positiondemonstrates the extent to which women both questioned and effectivelyredefined their marginal position.

Such women would have been quite aware of the authority of the written wordand of the fact that they only would be allowed the possibility to narrateprovided they upheld the values of their patriarchal culture. It is perhaps such anawareness that made them realize they had no other recourse but to articulate

* Hasna Lebbady teaches English in the Faculty of Letters, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco. Sheprepared this article for the Theories of the Margins and Margins of Theory Conference at Abdelmalek EssaadiUniversity, Tetouan, Morocco, in December 2002, and thanks Abdellatif Akhib, editor of the forthcomingconference proceedings, for permission to publish it here.1 This is my translation of the folktale Ali ou yeghzel? As it appears in this article, the tale is one I compiled fromthe accounts told to me by numerous women in Tetouan. Tales such as this one are specific to Morocco, wherethey have been told for generations and where I believe they were brought from Al Andalus by the Muslims whowere exiled from Spain between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such tales, which are told in spokenMoroccan Arabic dareja as opposed to the more formal classical Arabic, are distinctly different from the talestold in the Atlas Mountains in the Tamazight or Tashelhit language. These tales, moreover, belong to a woman’soral tradition –closely associated with the large households of the medinas of northern Moroccan cities–and arequite different from the male oral tradition, which is associated with the helqa of such public spaces as the jamaael fna in Marrakesh. For instance, the women who told these tales did not expect remuneration for their effortsas did the men in the helqa who often passed around some sort of receptacle for contributions from the audience.

ISSN 1066–9922 print/ISSN 1473–9666 online/03/020131-10 2003 Editors of CritiqueDOI: 10.1080/1066992032000130594

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themselves within the structures imposed on them by the center. This realizationis what enabled them to resort to indirect means in order to transgress thepatriarchal norms even while they conformed to them. To this extent their talescan be described as ‘palimpsestic,’ that is,

Works whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible and less sociallyacceptable levels of meaning. Thus these [nineteenth-century English] authors managedthe difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conform-ing to and subverting patriarchal literary standards.2

This is precisely what the Moroccan women’s tales achieve by conforming to themale norms on the surface but by conveying quite different messages under-neath.

Women’s Tales and Contemporary Theory

A close look at some of these tales reveals them to be quite different from thefairy tales told in the West, since they are not entirely at the service of whatJacques Lacan terms the symbolic order of language or of the law of the fatherassociated with it.3 Like their European counterparts, these Moroccan womenalso felt completely excluded from the male narrative modes that failed torepresent their desires. This is because within the patriarchal order a woman isnot supposed to have desires, much less express them. However, due to the factthat these Moroccan women were segregated from the male public domain, theywere endowed with a greater measure of freedom to express themselves sincethey were addressing an audience that would have been predominantly female.This aspect also rendered them more aware than their European counterparts ofsociety’s constraining role on their sexuality. As Michel Foucault has pointedout, sexuality is shaped by and according to the interests of those in power andis a ‘historical construct,’ what he calls ‘a great surface network,’ and not ‘anatural given.’4 It is such an awareness on the part of Moroccan women thatenabled them to transform the modes belonging to the public sphere and tomould their tales into narratives within which they could express themselves.

2 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-centuryLiterary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 73.3 For Lacan the symbolic order is the third order, after the real and the imaginary, which the child attains in theprocess of becoming a socialized and gendered subject. It is what he describes as coming under ‘le nom du pere’(emphasis in the original) which, he claims, has been identified with ‘la figure de la loi’ since the beginning ofhistorical times; see Jacques Lacan, Ecrits 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 157–58. It is within the symbolic order, hemaintains, that the phallus is ‘le signifiant privilegie’; see Ecrits 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1971), p. 111. For a feminist readingof Lacan see Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole feudienne(New York: Norton, 1982). In fact, it would appear that these women were working within a tradition that is neither‘Western’ nor ‘Oriental’ and which, to my mind, makes them specifically Moroccan. Not only were theseMoroccan women’s circumstances different from those of their ‘Western’ counterparts, but they also differed fromthose of such legendary tale tellers as Sheherazade, since the Moroccan storytellers were not compelled to telltheir tales to a male audience under the threat of death. Nor were they constrained by such means as genitalmutilation, from which their counterparts in some East African cultures suffered, but which never formed partof Moroccan culture.4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 105–6.

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The concern with how women can truly articulate themselves, given theconfines of patriarchy, has impelled numerous French feminists to formulatetheories that would enable women to express themselves even while operatingwithin the male symbolic. Julia Kristeva attempts to bring the speaking body backinto discourse through the semiotic element of signification, which she associateswith the initial mother/child relationship and with the repressed female aspect oflanguage.5 For her, both the symbolic and the semiotic contribute to the signifyingsystem that for Lacan consists exclusively of the symbolic, which comes underthe law of the father. Similarly, Helene Cixous has proclaimed women as thesource of life and energy, and hailed the advent of a feminine mode of writingthat could subvert the authority of the male symbolic; the speaking body for herbecomes closely associated with what she terms ‘ecriture feminine.’6 It seems tome that these are the kinds of considerations that Moroccan women storytellerswere taking into account long before the French feminists began to formulate theirintellectual theories. The tales these women told appear to conform to Cixous’sclaim that woman writes in white ink, which she equates with the mother’s milk,since they are in fact not written at all but told orally and told, moreover, in themother tongue.7 The oral tradition is marginal to literacy, but it is what endowsthese tales with the flexibility and fluidity that tends to be lacking in written texts.Thus, along with the mother tongue, which is marginal to the written classicalArabic, the oral tradition enabled women to challenge the hegemony of malenarratives and of the written word—so closely associated with the law of thefather. Their oral narratives do not depend on the authority of an author or of anyspecial storyteller. Yet they demonstrate that these women were much more incontrol of their position than they are normally given credit for, and this is whatenabled them to redefine the marginal position of their gender.

Ali and a Weaver Too?

The emphasis on gender in ‘Ali and a Weaver Too?’ is evident at the outset whenthe protagonist is introduced as the youngest in a family of seven daughters. Her

5 The distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic elements of signification is perhaps Kristeva’s mostfamous contribution to language theory, on which she elaborates in a number of her early writings. See JuliaKristeva, Semeiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Tel Quel, 1969); idem, La Revolution du langagepoetique: l’avant-garde a la fin du XIXe siecle (Paris: Seuil, 1974); and idem, ‘Le sujet en process,’ in Polylogue(Paris: Seuil, 1977).6 Although Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have all attempted to formulate a writing that couldbe termed ‘ecriture feminine,’ the term was first used by Cixous; see Helene Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst: Universityof Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 245–64; see also Helene Cixous, ‘Castration and Decapitaiton,’ Signs 7, no.1 (Autumn 1981): 41–55. For a good clarification of ‘ecriture feminine’ see Verena Andermatt Conley’sintroduction to Helene Cixous, Readings with Clarice Lispector (London: Harvester, 1990).7 Orality did not impose itself on these women because they were necessarily illiterate. Some of them could readand often kept the book in front of them when they recited the Qur’an, for instance, to make sure they did notdistort it. It was actually the men, who had gone to the m’sid and formally memorized the Qur’an, who felt freeto recite it without the book. However, the households in which these tales were told would also have includedmany women who could not read. The mixture of literacy and orality appears to me to be characteristic of Morocco,especially of traditional Moroccan society.

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family is contrasted with her uncle’s family, which has seven sons. Some timeand effort is spent on describing the different trades that the seven sonslearned—occupations that were all appropriate for men—and those that the oldersisters learned, all of which were well suited for the women of the day. However,the youngest sister decided not to choose a craft considered suitable to womenbut rather to become an ‘alim, one of the men of learning who traditionally becametheologians and jurists. Apparently not encountering any objection from herfather, who, it is understood, would have been pleased to have an ‘alim in thefamily even though he had no sons, she set out to acquire all the learningassociated with the written word that would enable her to become an ‘alim. Onceshe had done so, she had to disguise herself as a man because an ‘alim wasunderstood to be a man. She thus became known as the ‘alim Ali and under thisdisguise could travel freely from medina to medina.

The sultan of a nearby medina, who was looking for a great man of learningto tutor his son, was told about the ‘alim Ali. So he asked Ali to come to hiscourt, and this is how it happened that Ali became acquainted with the youngprince. Ali and the king’s son eventually became close companions; the princeslowly began to perceive that he felt very attracted to Ali. He began to includehim in the gatherings he organized and to count on him more and more. The princebecame so fascinated by Ali that he began to doubt the nature of his attraction.How could he be so taken up with this young man? It didn’t seem natural, sohe figured that there must be more to it. So the prince set out to find out whetherAli was really a woman.

After consulting with his mother, the prince followed her advice and invitedAli for lunch with them to try and discern his gender from his manner of eating.For, as his mother had explained, women have a much more delicate way ofeating. However, Ali appeared to eat in as manly a manner as any other male,without, of course, exceeding the limits of politeness. After again consulting withhis mother, the prince next invited Ali to spend the night with them to see whethercertain plants that were supposed to dwindle and die in a room where a womanbreathed would be affected in a harmful way. Having become a person of learning,Ali was also informed in these matters and spent the night tending the plants sothat they would not die and therefore the prince would not be able to prove thathe was really a woman. Finally, as a last resort, the prince proposed that Ali cometo the hammam (bath) with him and his companions—the final proof being thatonce Ali undressed in the hammam they would be able to tell for sure whetherhe was a man or a woman.

However, Ali quickly sought out the gellas8 at the hammam, gave him a letter,and asked him to give it back when he next saw Ali. This is what the gellas didthe next day when he saw Ali coming to the hammam with the prince and hiscompanions. After reading the letter, Ali told them that his father had died andthat he had to leave immediately for the funeral. Back in his hometown wherethe prince eventually succeeded in following him, Ali transformed himself into8 The gellas is the person who sits at the entrance of the hammam, gets paid, and keeps an eye on the clothesleft at the entrance by the clients, etc.

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a woman again. She sat spinning wool with the women of the household wherethe prince was finally able to discover her, asking his titular question, ‘Ali anda spinner too?’ The woman responded, ‘If stuck, what can he do?’

Is There an Essence to Gender?

So what do we have here? On the surface this appears to be the archetypal storyof a woman who pretends to be a man just like some of Shakespeare’s charactersin such plays as Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Being a man is revealed tobe only a matter of role playing that can be learned, much like the trades oroccupations mentioned at the beginning of the tale. The woman who wishes totransgress the boundaries imposed on her by gender has to adopt a male guisein order to exercise the male profession of her choice. This tale raises interestingquestions about what actually constitutes gender: is it only a matter of what onelearns and of how one acts on the surface? The tale goes to some length to raisequestions about whether femininity is social—a matter of manners such as howone eats—or whether it has some more essential qualities, such as the capacityto make certain plants dwindle and die.9 Even the idea that gender is a matterof biology remains at best a hypothesis that the prince is incapable of proving.The female element here is what the prince senses but which he cannot reducerationally either to the social or to the biological.

Some of the questions the tale raises appear to be similar to those raised bya number of contemporary British women writers, who call into question thepossibility that gender could have an essence. At the heart of the tale is theimage of the ‘alim, the archetypal representative of male learning, who isrevealed in fact to be a woman. Gender here becomes a kind of mask,reminiscent of Angela Carter’s protagonist in The Passion of New Eve, who hasbeen forcefully transformed—by way of an operation—from a male (Evelyn) toa female (Eve) compelling him/her to proclaim:

Under the mask of maleness I wore another mask of femaleness but a mask that now Inever would be able to remove.10

In the Moroccan tale, the idea of masking is accentuated by the fact that noactual physical transformation takes place in the character involved. Gender herebecomes much more a matter of taking control of a given role. This is similarto Jenny Diski’s The Dream Mistress, which depicts the woman writer’s attemptto take hold of the symbolic in terms of her inhabiting the lighthouse and tollhouse through which all of us, who are depicted as travelers at sea, are obligedto pass.11 The lighthouse here becomes an apt image of the phallic symbolic,

9 By raising such questions, for which it refuses to provide definite answers, the tale appears to support GayatriSpivak’s assertion that ‘essentialism is a trap’ and that ‘the world’s women do not all relate to the privilegingof essence, especially through “fiction”, or “literature”, in quite the same way.’ See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 89.10 Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago, 1990), p. 132.11 Jenny Diski, The Dream Mistress (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996).

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which the woman writer inhabits and manipulates from within. The womanwriter in that story revels in the fluidity of water, with which she tries to reinvestlanguage so that it becomes more capable of representing her. This appears tobe similar to what ‘Ali and a Spinner Too?’ also achieves. By transformingherself into a man—an archetypal ‘alim at that—the nameless woman here alsocomes to inhabit the symbolic which she manipulates from within. This is whatenables her publicly to assert herself since her transformation endows her withboth a male name and a male profession.

Yet even while she assumes all those male characteristics she still retains acertain inexplicable attraction that troubles the prince. This feature, which he canonly sense but not actually prove, could be the woman’s ‘jouissance’ thatbecomes associated with the discourse beyond the masculine text of reason andorder. This is in effect the semiotic that, according to Kristeva, manifests itselfonly indirectly through bodily drives.12 What is interesting about this particularinstance of ‘jouissance’ is that it accounts not only for what the woman is ableto express through bodily drives but also for the prince’s response to her.‘Jouissance’ thus becomes the effect she has on him as ‘reader.’ To this extent,the woman reveals herself to be more than what Roland Barthes terms the‘readable’ text,13 which can be consumed passively, and to demand a much moreactive role on the part of her ‘reader.’ Thus the woman inside the male disguise,in the tale, demonstrates that she is not entirely constrained by the malestructures but is, in fact, the one who has learned to inhabit those structures andeffectively to manipulate them from within.

Gender, Writing and Empowerment

To the extent that she actually writes the letter that figures at the heart of the tale,the woman in this tale reveals herself to be a woman writer. Like the contempor-ary British women writers I have mentioned, she can only appear to write likemen because she is obliged to operate within the male symbolic order. In fact,she both uses and abuses male modes of writing, enabling her simultaneously tosend two different messages. The first, which is meant for the men in the tale,is intended to confuse them and prevent them from perceiving her true identity.Those for whom the other, more significant message is meant begin to becomeapparent when we consider that the letter is what the woman sends to herself.The fact that the nameless female protagonist actually addresses the letter toherself suggests that she is sending the message to women in general, to theaudience that would have consisted mostly of women.

12 Kristeva, La Revolution du langage poetique.13 Barthes distinguished between texts that are ‘lisible’ (readable) and those that are ‘illisible’ (unreadable)although they may be ‘scriptible’ (writable); see Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970; English trans. New York:Hill & Wang, 1974). Later, Barthes described the ‘readable’ texts, which are easily interpretable, as producinga response of ‘plaisir’ (pleasure) while the ‘unreadable’ texts, which require more effort to interpret, are capableof producing a response that verges on ‘jouissance.’ See Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973);English trans. The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974).

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What the tale seems to bring most forcefully to our attention is the fact thatnothing is what it appears to be. In fact, nothing has a fixed and definitemeaning; meanings are revealed to be shifting and fluid. This is the case not onlyfor the protagonist’s identity but also for the letter that she writes. To the extentthat the message she sends to the women is quite different from the one shepresents to the men, her letter becomes a floating signifier open to differentinterpretations. However, it is the woman in this tale who takes control of thesignifier, enabling it to convey different meanings to different ‘readers.’ Thewoman’s letter reveals her to have become an expert manipulator of malestrategies that she is able to use against them. This is the case of the strategy sheuses to keep the men in the tale in their state of uncertainty about her trueidentity.

And what is her true identity in this text? To the extent that the figure of the‘alim represents the male modes of writing, within which the woman inscribesherself, she becomes the woman who embodies the male text and maleknowledge in general. She also self-consciously calls attention to herself sinceshe writes a letter that she sends to herself. Her text can thus be described as aform of metafiction, in which it is the reader ‘who is maneuvered by the workinto a “proper” position from which to perceive the paradoxically hidden butperceptible structure of meaning.’14 The privileged reader here, who originallywould have included mostly women but who now includes all readers, knowsthat the protagonist is really a woman in ways that the men in the text areincapable of knowing. This instance of dramatic irony suggests that the readeris invited to become a collaborator instead of just a passive consumer, one whocan take part actively in uncovering the tale’s layers of meaning. Even the princeis positioned as a reader in search of the woman in this text.

To the extent that her body becomes her text, the woman here is writing herbody as Cixous advises women to do.15 It is by subverting the predominantlymale structures of learning and male modes of writing that the woman at theheart of this tale is able to speak her body. For the speaking body is the womanwho enters the male symbolic which she transforms from within, enabling herto represent herself and not simply to conform to others’ representations of her.According to Kristeva, the speaking body, which is evident in the semioticaspect of signification, adds the affective to the purely rational and structural.16

It puts back into communication the notion of desire, which can be reducedexclusively neither to the biological nor to the social. This is what enables thewoman in the tale to convey the coded message to the women in the audience.

And what is the message that she sends these women? She wishes them toperceive that the importance of the written word is not literally in the worditself—not in its essence—but rather in the use that is made of it. It is theintentions of those in power, those who normally do the reading and interpreting,

14 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narratives: The Metafictional Paradox (London: Routledge, 1991), p. xvi.15 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’16 Kristeva, La Revolution du langage poetique.

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that determine the meanings. This is the case of the ‘ulama (plural of ‘alim) whoread and interpreted the Islamic sources on which they based themselves aslegislators. Those ‘ulama, who contributed to the actual writing of the law andused it to constrain women’s lives, could be the ones who imposed the meaningson the Islamic texts. Such a realization on the part of the women involved intransmitting the coded message in this tale would suggest that they wereanticipating some of the concerns of the contemporary Islamic feminists whoargue that it is not so much the Islamic sources which constrain women as theway those sources have been interpreted from predominantly male perspectiveswith patriarchal interests in mind.17

Texts, such as the letter in this tale, derive their signification not from whatis actually written in them (or not written at all as the case may be here) butrather from the intentions and interests of those who send them. The letter, whichderives its authority from the fact that it is ‘written’ and is thus emblematic ofmale knowledge and jurisdiction, in fact might be empty inside or it may containa message that is completely different from the one actually attributed to it. Theletter here, like the protagonist herself, may not be what it appears to be. Sucha text derives its power from the position of the person who sends it and the onewho reads it, both of which have been appropriated by the woman in this tale.To this extent, the woman reveals that what is written—the maktoub, whichtraditionally has been used to mean that which is destined and cannot bechanged—actually may not be as definitely fixed or destined as women havebeen led to believe. Femininity, for instance, may not be women’s essentialdestiny but only what patriarchal society arbitrarily has imposed on them byclaiming to base itself on the letter of the law. In fact, there may be no substanceto male authority, which could be entirely arbitrary.

The discovery that the written word may not be as rigidly fixed in place as itappears to be, and may not in itself be the source of power, becomes anempowering one for the woman in the tale. She realizes that she too canreinterpret it, as the Islamic feminists mentioned above would advocate, and thuscan also manipulate it. To this extent the male symbolic becomes both the sourceof her confinement and also that of her liberation. The woman’s expertmanipulation of the symbolic is evident not only in the use that she makes of theletter in the tale but also in the words used to tell the tale itself. The taledemonstrates, through the use of puns and some sophisticated play on words,

17 This is the case of Fatima Mernissi who has undertaken revisionist readings of some hadith that can be tracedback to Abu Bakr and Abu Hurayra, depicting the latter as misogynists who could have distorted some of theProphet’s sayings after his death; see Fatima Mernissi, Le Harem politique: Le Prophete et les femmes (1987),trans. by Mary Jo Lakeland as The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam(Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1991), pp. 49–81. Leila Ahmed also argues that some of the more emancipatingviews of women that had characterized the outset of Islam were underplayed during the Abbasid period in favorof the ‘androcentric voices of Islam’ that became the only ones allowed to be heard due to what she terms ‘aninterpretive decision’; see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 67. Similarly Nawal El Saadawi denounces practices such as femalegenital mutilation, which she argues are forms of patriarchal control of women that have been attributed falselyto Islam; see Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve (London: Zed Books, 1980).

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that the spoken Moroccan Arabic can be used as poetically and as eloquently asthe written classical Arabic itself. This becomes particularly evident in the finalexchange between the protagonist, who has now revealed herself to be a woman,and the prince, who finally discovers her and asks, ‘Ali ou yeghzel?’ (Ali and aspinner too?) She responds, ‘Ida hrafetlu ash ye’mel?’ (If stuck, what can hedo?)

Here the prince jokingly questions how one can be a man of learning and alsoa spinner of wool—a task normally associated with women. This seemingcontradiction is highlighted beautifully by the choice of the word ghzel itself,which not only means to spin, but has numerous other significant connotations,such as ghazal, which can mean “weaver” or “eulogizing one’s love in poetry”.These different connotations all imply a form of narrativity, ranging from thespinning of yarns or telling of tales to the much more elaborate process ofpraising a beloved in verse. It now becomes evident that the protagonist not onlyhas revealed herself to be a woman—even a loving woman—but also the onewho is associated primarily with the telling of tales, possibly even of this taleitself. Furthermore, by punning on ‘ghazal’ and thus foregrounding her involve-ment in both the storytelling and the more elaborate ‘ghazal’ poetry, the womandemonstrates that she is in fact transgressing the barriers between popular andmore elite art forms and thus dismantling their hierarchies. Her strategy, in thisrespect, becomes similar to the mixing of genres characteristic of so muchcontemporary postmodern and postcolonial writing.

In her response, the word hrafetlu, which here implies that he was stuck, hasconnotations that touch upon some of the central themes of the tale. Hrafetlucontains the root for hirfa occupation, from which she taharafat, or has deviated,by refusing an occupation that is proper to women. She refuses to stick to theharf or letter (including the letter of the law) of what is harfian, literally definedas femininity, and thus refuses to remain within the harf or edge/margin. Sherefuses to remain within the marginal position—including that which perceiveswomen’s tales as merely popular and therefore insignificant art forms—imposedon her by patriarchal society. So when she says hrafetlu, referring to ‘Ali whomshe has incorporated,’ she demonstrates that if he was stuck it is because he wasconfining himself to one extreme conception of his identity. It is the man whowas stuck, not the woman. For she finds no contradiction in revealing herself tohave the artful, even magical, capacity to move between genders. And she cantransform a female task such as spinning or weaving into a male one ofcelebrating her love in poetry, just as she can turn a great man of learning, an‘alim, into a spinner of wool or of yarns. If she is able to express all this, it isbecause she has taharfet or deviated from the role of femininity imposed on her.And by doing so she has demonstrated her capacity to inhabit the center and tomanipulate it to her own ends.

What is more, the prince has no problem understanding her statementperfectly well and responding to it positively, demonstrating that he too islearning—for hasn’t he managed to discover the woman in the text and isn’t shethe one who in fact has been his tutor? Only once he learns his lessons well does

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he become a fit subject of union with her, which is why she reverts back to beinga woman, thereby allowing for the union at the end. For the true learning in thistext is revealed to be not the purely male learning nor, for that matter, the purelyfemale learning. It is the learning that involves supplementing the symbolic withthe semiotic and bringing the affective back to the rational. The true person ofknowledge is, like Tiresias, the one who ‘knows’ both what it is to be a man andto be a woman. So the union between them at the end becomes a marriagebetween true minds. Or could that be all?

References

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the Text (New York: Hill & Wang).Carter, Angela (1990) The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago).Cixous, Helene (1980) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de

Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst: University of Mas-sachusetts Press), pp. 245–64.

Cixous, Helene (1981) ‘Castration or Decapitation,’ in Signs, 7, no. 1, pp. 41–55.Cixous, Helene (1990) Readings with Clarice Lispector, edited, translated and introduced by

Verena Andermatt Conley (London: Harvester).Diski, Jenny (1996) The Dream Mistress (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson).El Saadawi, Nawal (1980) The Hidden Face of Eve (London: Zed Books).Foucault, Michel (1990) The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth:

Penguin).Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press).Hutcheon, Linda (1991) Narcissistic Narratives: The Metafictional Paradox (London: Rout-

ledge).Kristeva, Julia (1969) Semeiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Tel Quel).Kristeva, Julia (1974) La Revolution du langage poetique: l’avant-garde a la fin du XIXe

siecle (Paris: Seuil).Kristeva, Julia (1977) Polylogue (Paris: Seuil).Lacan, Jacques (1966) Ecrits 1 (Paris: Seuil).Lacan, Jacques (1971) Ecrits 2 (Paris: Seuil).Mernissi, Fatima (1991) Le Harem politique: Le Prophete et les femmes, trans. Mary Jo

Lakeland as The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights inIslam (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books).

Mitchell, Juliet and Jacqueline Rose, eds. (1982) Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and theecole feudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton).

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