Novel
هذه أنا
Not translated into English
Sharifa al-Qiyadi · 1994
Synopsis
هذه أنا (This Is Me): from a hospital bed, a woman looks back on her life, in a narrative that moves back and forth between present and past. She sees again a house dominated by a father whose authority brings unhappiness to the mother and the daughters, then Salem, the man she chose to marry. Through her, the novel makes man, as father or husband, the other against whom a Libyan woman collides, under the weight of custom.
Context
The novel appeared in 1994 in Malta, from the publisher Elga, eleven years after the author's first collection of short stories, published in 1983. With Mardiya al-Na'as, she is among the first Libyan women to have written novels, and her study of 1997 on Libyan women's writing is a reference. The book is still read and studied in Libya: a master's dissertation was devoted to it in Zawiya in 2021, and a study in the review al-Asala analysed in 2025 the figure of man as other, through the father and the husband.
Who it is for
For discovering, in Arabic and without translation, a Libyan pioneer and her view of the authority of father and husband.
Prizes and reception
Najat al-Hammali sees in it a hostility towards man born of social pressures more than of the husband's acts.
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