Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories

Rifaat writes with the elegant simplicity of an Arabic Margaret Atwood. One thing that amazed me about Distant View of the Minaret was that Rifaat, unlike most other female Arab writers I've read, does not shy away from writing explicitly about sex. From the very first story, "Distant View of the Minaret," sex is openly thought about and discussed by the female characters. In this story, the narrator begins by discussing her attempts at experiencing an orgasm during sex with her husband. The story actually takes place, in the beginning, during sex. So great is the narrator's boredom that she even "noted her toenails needed cutting" (2). A painful, but important cultural act is written about in "Bahiyya's Eyes." The female narrator recalls her youth and the female circumcision forced upon her by her female neighbors. She remembers, "They left a wound in my body and another wound deep inside me, a feeling that a wrong had been done to me, a wrong that could never be undone"(9). The story, which is written as a letter addressed to the narrator's daughter, concludes succinctly with "Daughter, I'm not crying now because I'm fed up or regret that the Lord created me a woman. No, it's not that. It's just that I'm sad about my life and my youth that have come and gone without my knowing how to live them really and truly as a woman" (11). I also loved the female camaraderie of the story "An Incident in the Ghobashi Household." The mother in the story gives her pregnant daughter everything she possesses in order to save the daughter from the punishment that would result from an illegitimate pregnancy. This story presents a mother-daughter bond that is frequently overlooked in the Arabic literature I have read. Usually the focus is on mother-son or man-homeland love, and female are frequently placed in opposition to each other. Therefore this story is refreshing. The power relationship between a woman and her husband's mistress is explored in "The Long Night of Winter." What appears to be a homoerotic experience is actually a psychologically complex balance of power and desire. Rene Girard writes about this kind of mimetic desire, but I assume that Rifaat bases the story off her own personal experiences and observations, rather than a practical study in mimesis. To me, this adds to Rifaat's ability as a storyteller. The last story, "Just Another Day," is also beautifully crafted. Death is presented from the point of view of the deceased. Within the context of the story, certain observations are made about life. The narrator says, "What was to stop me from staying in bed? I had grown tired of pretending I had jobs to do that filled my day, while in actual fact I had no role to fulfill" (113). In this story, Rifaat makes a point about the life of the elderly and describes the life of a person overlooked by society. It is interesting to note that Alifa Rifaat is an orthodox Muslim. Her writing reflects the ideology of gender equality that was preache

This is a remarkable collection of short stories from Egypt?s urban and peasant societies. Alifa Rifaat stories are full of raw emotion and overwhelming sense of the hopelessness of the human experience. Rifaat is an extraordinarily gifted writer with a fresh approach and a remarkable ability to transplant us completely in just a few paragraphs to totally different worlds, to the lives of the very ordinary.The recurring themes of this collection of short stories are sexual frustration, pervasive cultural pressures and death. The loneliness and emptiness of the lives of Egyptian women from every class and background are, in particular, well portrayed in an honest and bare fashion. Each and every story in this collection stood out for me and forced me to reflect on the lives of their imperfect characters. The melancholy that dominates the style is so reminiscent of Annie Proulx?s Close Range; with ordinary sad lives racing at breakneck pace from hope to the inevitable acceptance of no fulfillment. Rifaat?s characters, however, illustrate quiet perseverance along with their submission to their fate in a uniquely Egyptian way.Rifaat is a very sensitive writer capable of conveying so much emotion and graphic detail with very few words. In the ? The Flat in Nakshabendi Street? Rifaat talks of an elderly Cairo spinster who has nothing left in life to do but attend funerals and pick on others, she captures the image so well ?Everyone else lived in hope yet her own life was a struggle to ensure that the present routine continued forever?.In ?The Long Night of Winter? Rifaat starts with an exceptional setting of the scene, a wife that knows of the never ending infidelity of her husband, ?In an instant between sleep and wakefulness, an instant outside the bounds of time, that gave the sensation of being eternal, the sounds of night, like slippery fishes passing through the mesh of a net, registered themselves on Zennouba?s hearing, filtering gradually into her awakening consciousness: the machine ?like croaking of frogs and the barking of dogs in the fields answered by the dogs of the village on the other bank in a never-ending exchange of information in some code language?. This first paragraph is typical of Rifaat approach to seducing the reader to relating to and advocating for her characters.It was unfortunate that Johnson-Davis chose to use ?Allah? in lieu of ?God? in the English translation, apart from that the translation comes across faithful to the original, with thoughtful and beautiful often lyrical prose.

A friend who teaches non-western literature recommended this author, and now I wish there were other collections of Rifaat's in English. I am not a short-story lover at all, but these were wonderful, well-rounded gems. Other Egyptian writers whom I have read are also English speakers, so reading Rifaat takes one truly back to an unfiltered Egypt.

The author is not militant, but writes realistically about the lives of (mostly) women in Egypt. Each of the slice-of-life stories is short, usually less than ten pages, but in those pages the reader is drawn into the lives and personal struggles of ordinary, likable people. It's easy, interesting reading, and I was sorry to reach the end of the 116 pages.