March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.
Interviews
A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra
But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.
Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart
For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.
To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer
Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . . I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.
Essays
On Women Who Refuse to Die: Who Will Win the 2022 Booker International?
by Barbara Halla
I’m being facetious, but this understanding of literature is pernicious—this desire to determine artistic value along essentialist gender lines. It also seeks to explain the existence of global and local literary canons as meritocratic, rather than the result of conscious policy decisions that have contributed to the erasure and devaluing of women’s writing. I was wondering about this argument as I made my way through the six books shortlisted for the Booker International 2022—five of which were written by women and published in the past fifteen years in South Korea, India, Poland, and Argentina. To be straightforward to the point of being trite: these five books undermine the notion that there is anything akin to a universal ‘women’s writing.’
F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (and the verse as an explosion, the book as an island)
by José Garcia Escobar
“I had never read anything written in Russian before then where a woman talks about having been raped, I didn’t know how to talk about it in Russian,” Lida writes. “I just took a flying leap into my experience and memories. I just had to fly beyond the horizon, along an unknown path, straight toward the rapist, to once again draw close to him and say: ‘this isn’t right’ and to repeat ‘this isn’t right,’ ‘this isn’t right’ forever and ever.” By the time Lida finished reading Mateyuk, everyone at the Word Order bookstore in Saint Petersburg was silent. “It was the first time I spoke out loud about having been raped,” Lida writes.
Three months later Galina hosted the first meeting of F pis’mo.
“For me, this group is one of the most important spaces of my existence as a woman who writes,” says Lida. “If I compare it to other, male-dominated literary projects, I can say that I am not constricted, anxiously anticipating the danger of being dismissed as a writer simply because I am a woman.”
The Redemption of the Collective Past in the Infinite Present: Annie Ernaux’s The Years
by Katarina Gadze
In fact, the narrator’s inner experiences and perception of reality determine this subjective time. Between what happens in the world and what happens to the narrator, there is “no point of convergence . . . no relation between her life and History, though traces of the latter remain fixed in her mind.” There are, instead, “two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received than forgotten, the other all static shots.” This psychological dimension of the book, which creeps in like an internal time, allows the narrator to escape the confines of a historical and linear time that we see emerging in her retrospective narrative.
Reviews
The Work of Feminism: On Elena Medel’s The Wonders
by Rachel Stanyon
María is painfully aware that, having been born in the middle of the twentieth century, her gender has been just as much an impediment to her success and independence as her class. Alicia resists many ideals of femininity and always ensures that she holds the power in her sex life; she perhaps represents in parts an idea of feminism centered on sexual freedom without the constraints of motherhood. María, on the other hand, knows that her life would have been different if she were not limited by the conventions of femininity and the realities of the female body.
One’s Own Desire: Arab Women Writers Speak for Themselves in We Wrote in Symbols
by Mariam Diefallah
As an Egyptian, Arab, and Muslim woman, love and lust have largely occupied two separate worlds in my life. While I yearned for the elusive idea of love in my youth and pursued it in relationships, I had also deeply internalized that it had to end in heartbreak; I believed that love, like many ideas, could never be fully comprehended. But lust was different. Lust was an action—an action to avoid and repress, because it leads to sex, and sex is dangerous. When I started reading We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, I thought of my upbringing, of the two separate worlds I have built for love and lust, and the difficulties of reconciling them in my adult life. . .
The Feral Tenderness of the Margins: On Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls
by Rubén López
The English translation of the Spanish original, undertaken by Kit Maude, begins with a semantic manifesto by the author on the reappropriation of the word “travesti,” a Spanish slur used in the nineties to describe people who were assigned male at birth but develop a feminine gender identity. Sosa Villada, who herself identifies that way, rejects the idea of sanitizing her existence and that of her companions with other categories such as “trans women” or “transsexuals.” On the contrary: “I reclaim the stonings and spittings, I reclaim the scorn,” she declares emphatically. To identify herself in other terms would mean to erase her life and all the baggage of living in a society capable of using violence to reassure cisheteronormativity.
Translations
Translation Tuesday: CABO ROUGE/Kabiosile by Soleida Ríos,
trans. by Kristin Dykstra
How could I tell the tale of my return to a state known as normal, where my senses might show me what really exists, and that infinite connectivity among neurons, which populate and make of my brain an organ for understanding, confirmed exactly as ….?
As if we hadn’t shifted dimensions, the (Recent-Awakening Smile) woman returns to her sandwiches and says, looking at me in complete passivity, but as if extending an invitation or request to me:
—I left MY COMMUNITY and I moved on to THE COUNTRYSIDE … From the countryside I came HERE.
Translation Tuesday: “a day (like any other)” by Carla Bessa,
trans. by Elton Uliana
a day (like any other)
get up early, have a shower, make some coffee, wake up the kids, kiss them, wake up the husband, kiss him, welcome the housekeeper, good morning!, help!, hi?, good morning!, have breakfast with the husband and kids, help!, did you say anything, honey?, me?, strange I heard something too mum, come on, time to go to school, take the husband and kids to the car, say goodbye, help! walk the dog, here comes the neighbour, hello!, help!, sorry?, how are you?, very well thank you, see you later, help!, turn around, keep walking, go to the bank, go to the hairdresser, help!, help!, go to the beautician, go to the shops, come back home, cook, iron, clean the house, no need for the cleaner it’s done already, visit the mother, help!, help!, help!, make an appointment at the gynaecologist, smile to the doorman, help!, all right, ma’am?, all great and you?. . .
Translation Tuesday: “The Moon’s Desire” by Ines Abassi
trans. by Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza
They say that children with iron deficiency will peel the lead paint off the walls and eat it. What about souls with love deficiency? They feed on the bark of trees—every single one, the trees on the road as well as the forest trees. Souls that are hungry for love touch trees, get close to them and embrace them. I did this every time, in every trip I took after becoming free of him, and from his hand and the frying pan. Every time I stopped the rental car and get out to embrace the trees.
A life can completely change between one night and another.
*****
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