1. David Harvey on the geographical imagination quoted in Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 18.

2. For an excellent discussion of the military's attitude and policies concerning men and women's comparative strength see Judith Stiehm, Arms and the Enlisted Woman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 198-205.

3. Thanks to Jody McAuliffe for this insight on the book's presentation.

4. Sontag writes, "Photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision" (Susan Sontag, On Photography [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977], 89). The "lust of the eye," states Gray, "requires the novel, the unusual, the spectacular. It cannot satiate itself on the familiar, the routine, the everyday.'' His description of the burning bombed villages on the French Riviera as "magnificent" must strike us as obscene, despite the explanation that the aesthetic appeal of war is not beauty but awe in the face of power that produces a "feeling of the sublime.'' Part of the satisfaction is survival, as "spectators we are superior to that which we survey . . . the self is no longer important to the observer; it is absorbed into the objects with which it is concerned" (J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle [New York: Harper, 1970], 29, 33, 34, 36).

5. As the less euphoric half-page preface to the second edition acknowledged in 1980, other wars followed the two-year war. The preface continued to urge the importance of living the war through its images, concluding: "Whoever suffers, learns."

6. Michael Mezzatesta, director of the Duke University Museum of Art, brought to my attention the startling resemblance between this image and the classical Greek statue of the sleeping hermaphrodite. R. R. R. Smith describes this hermaphrodite as lying in "a long spiral posture. The back view is the more effective and clearly the principal one. . . . The proportions and forms from behind are clearly female; only exploration round the figure revealed its bisexuality. . . . The figure is certainly asleep, and the raised lower leg must be rightly interpreted as 'troubled sleep'" (R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture: A Handbook [London: Thames and Hudson, 1991], 133-34).

7. Sontag writes: "Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism. . . . Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle. As much as they create sympathy, photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions. Photography's realism creates a confusion about the real" (Sontag 1977, 18, 79, 99).

8. The photography historian John Tagg writes, "The Real is a complex of dominant and dominated discourses which given texts exclude, separate, or do not signify. If the text or picture is going to represent a reality which is different from, and perhaps determinant of, the picture itself, then this representation will be possible through an act of negation, through a demonstration of the incoherence of the system of dominant images. . . . We must not allow ourselves the expedient of imagining something existing 'before' representation by which we may explain the representation away. . . . We must begin to analyze the real representational practices that go on in a society. . . . We must describe the function of 'specific' individuals within them. . . . Only in this way will we come to understand how ideologies are produced in real representational practices" (John Tagg, The Burden of Representation [Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1988], 101-2, 211).

9. "Peace will never occur as a consequence of weakness, exhaustion, or fear," writes Gray as he comments on Nietzsche's assessments of military power (Gray 1970, 226).

10. Many women were first brought into the American military during World War II and challenged, D'Ann Campbell writes, "prevailing norms on practical and symbolic levels" (D'Ann Campbell, "The Regimented Women of WWII," in Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory , ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias [Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990], 108). Some claim that resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1970s raised awareness of women's systematic exclusion from those parts of the military that allowed promotion and therefore access to decision-making positions where they might make a difference to the declaration and waging of war.

11. American Bar Association Journal (December 1991): 52-59. Christine Chinkin, an international lawyer, writes about the difficulty of defining war crimes: the Geneva Convention was designed around World War II crimes, and the extrapolation to other kinds of wars is difficult (conversation between the author and Christine Chinkin, 15 April 1994). Another international lawyer, Winston Nagan, ascribes the confusion to the fact that the "labels 'war' and 'peace' hold different meanings for different participants in these processes. For the lawyers, war effectively means a breach of article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter involving state-to-state armed conflict. Civil 'wars' in failed states have a more ambiguous characterization" (Winston Nagan, "Human Rights as a Negotiating Tool in Peacemaking," manuscript, 10).

12. "Eritrea: The Kitchen Calls," Economist , 25 June 1994.

13. See Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (Routledge, 1989), for an illuminating discussion of the tension between constructivist and essentialist language and the political expediency of essentialism upon occasion. Biologists are divided about the role of gender in aggressivity as also about whether aggressive behavior is innate or learned.

14. Bettina Musall, "Women at the Front," World Press Review , March 1994, 49.

15. Amy Swerdlow describes the 1960s Women Strike for Peace (WSP) as "a disorganized band of middle-class housewives pleading for the children in the domestic terms they had been taught since childhood. . . . In their concern for the fate of their children, the WSPers were no different from millions of other American women. However, they did differ in their broader perception of motherhood as a social and communal function. . . . The WSPers were not concerned with transforming sex role ideology but rather with using it to enhance women's political power" (Amy Swerdlow, "Motherhood and the Subversion of the Military State: Women's Strike for Peace Confronts the House Committee on Un-American Activities," in Elshtain and Tobias 1990, 23, 24).

16. Kanaan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), 287, where he reproduces an Iraqi soldier's ID card on which his occupation was marked "violation of women's honor." This book has enjoyed a mixed reception.

17. Dorothy Q. Thomas and Regan E. Ralph, "Rape in War: Challenging the Tradition of Impunity," SAIS Review (winter-spring 1994): 81-99.

18. Elshtain suggests that the dichotomized constructions of war and peace are reinforced by Kant's absolute segregation of public and private. It is in the former that Perpetual Peace can reign for "genuine peace must nullify all existing causes of war" (Jean Bethke Elshtain, "The Problem with Peace," in Elshtain and Tobias 1990, 264).

19. Alexandre Bloch, "Culture of Peace," paper delivered at Opatja Conference on Peace, Human Rights, and the Responsibility of the Intellectual, Croatia, 1 October 1994.

1. On 27 June 1969 the police raided Stonewall Inn, a homosexual bar in Greenwich Village. For the first time, the patrons resisted what had become a pattern of harassment. Their resistance drew support from the New York homosexual community, which erupted into a three-day rebellion.

2. Jacques Derrida, "Beyond Marx," lecture given at Duke University, 4 October 1993.

3. Walter Benjamin writes that the "destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society . . . Mankind's . . . self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order" (Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections [New York: Schocken, 1969 (1936)], 242).

4. "Hollywood directors went to work for the government and injected a sense of drama into documentary formats" (Springer 1985, 151).

5. When I asked the NBC anchor Tom Brokaw during the Journalists at War conference held at Duke University in November 1994 what triggered media interest in war, he answered instantaneously: "Testosterone."

6. For an analysis of the role of the media in the war in Bosnia, see Mark Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina (International Centre against Censorship, 1994).

7. Robert Block, "Killers," New York Review of Books , 18 November 1993, 10. The American journalist Martha Gellhorn, who covered the Spanish civil war and World War II, wrote that cowboy films were "more thrilling to the audience than a mere convoy of bombers flying at a great safe height and sending down indiscriminate, expensive steel-cased death and destruction" (Gellhorn 1988, 46).

8. The "Top Gun" incident was reported to me by Kathy Wilkes, honorary Octopus in the Croatian navy, during the conference Peace, Human Rights, and the Responsibility of the Intellectual, 29 September-3 October 1994, Opatja, Croatia.

9. Interview with General Westmoreland in Jonathan Mirsky, "The War That Will Not End," New York Review of Books , 16 August 1990, 29. Detail on CBS motif from the author's conversation with Lynda Boose, who served in Vietnam for two harrowing years.

10. Edward J. Epstein, News from Nowhere , quoted in Rick Berg, "Losing Vietnam: Covering the War in an Age of Technology," Cultural Critique (1985): 97. Frances Lindley Fralin writes: "Since before the American Civil War, scenes have been rearranged or created for the camera . . . Depending on how the picture is used, any war image can serve as successful propaganda--overtly or covertly" (Fralin 1985, 9).

11. There has been speculation about the connections between the Intifada and the war in Northern Ireland. Did the Palestinians copy the Irish when they first used stones and burning tires? And now in the 1990s the Northern Irish are calling their troubles the "Irish Intifada." Like the Palestinians, the Irish considered international media coverage in the wake of the 1969 Bogside Marches to be their first political victory (conversation between the author and the Irish cultural critic David Lloyd, Santa Cruz, 27 April 1995).

12. The Cable News Network called the Gulf War the "first 'real-time' television war which created instant history" (Gerbner 1992, 71).

13. See Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's account of the life of a gang girl called Tamika, where the practice of tagging is described. The language used to describe the gangs is distinctively military, e.g., "the boys treated United We Stand girls as an auxiliary unit." And she writes that the members "depersonalize the victims of their crimes in the same way the military and policemen depersonalize their targets" (LeBlanc 1994).

14. "The death event constitutes a new grid through which all experiencing now takes place . . . the death event, not as a string of facts that together form the basis for historical generalization, but as a structural alteration in the character of all experiencing which has crept up on us without our realizing it" (Wyschogrod 1985, 63-64).

15. Civilians have long been targeted despite rhetoric about concern for their protection. It was only with the Hague international commission in 1920 that their protection became international policy (see Walzer 1974, 94).

16. Conversation with Albert Eldridge, political scientist and my colleague at Duke University, 20 June 1990.

17. Angela Woollacott argues that World War I British women munitions workers thought of themselves as combatants and were proud of their yellow-stained hands that demonstrated to the world their involvement with dynamite (Woollacott 1994).

18. Ann Snitow discusses the tensions that split the Madres: some claimed that their sons were innocent, others embraced their sons' political activism as their own: "They thought their bereavement was not only a moral witnessing of crime and a demand for justice but also a specific intervention with immediate and threatening political implications to the state . . . Surely a mother's grief and rage removed from the home, suddenly exposed to publicity, are powerful, shocking" (Snitow 1989, 49).

19. In October 1987 the Arab League in Paris convened a conference of women of all confessions from Beirut entitled "La Femme libanaise témoin de la guerre," namely, the woman as eyewitness participant. On 20 April 1990 Muna Hrawi, the wife of the president, was reported by Arab News as having called on "Lebanese women to help stop civil war."

20. "Child Warriors: The Suicide Machine," Time , 18 June 1990, which contrasts with the 1982 Time article that highlighted the role of children as victims. See also "Iraq's War on Its Children," Amnesty Action , March-April 1989; and New York Times , 5 March 1989; Human Rights Watch (Human Rights in Iraq), 1990. On 15 December 1995 the New York Times editorial was entitled ''War's Children.'' It noted that within "the last decade, child victims of war include 2 million killed, 4 to 5 million disabled, 12 million left homeless, 10 million psychologically traumatized, and more than a million orphaned or separated from their parents. Children are often conscripted at a young age, and are forced to commit atrocities or witness brutalities visited upon their families and communities."

21. Other guerrilla groups such as the Vietminh and Vietcong considered girls to be as enlistable as boys (see Hayslip 1989).

22. To indicate my translation for many of the works--Khalifa's ' Abbad al-shams among them--at first mention in a chapter's discussion I give its title in the original language. And if my source is a later edition, I add the original publication date in square brackets for readers' convenience.

23. Elsewhere he writes: "Terror aims not only to control but also to change social actors . . . Terror may appear as a distinctive phase in a process of revolutionary transformation of society" (Corradi 1982-83, 63).

24. "Some believe that the war college (Carlisle) is preparing its students to fight the wrong war" ("Conventional Warfare," Atlantic , January 1990).

25. Palestine , vol. 11 (Beirut: PLO Press, 1982), 5.

1. Marnia Lazreg indicates that discourse about Algerian woman succumbs to a "prevailing paradigm [whose] ultimate effect is to preclude any understanding of Algerian women in their lived reality : as subjects in their own right. Instead, they are reified, made into mere bearers of unexplained categories" (Lazreg 1988, 94).

2. During the nineteenth century Algerians who resisted the French, as Ibn Badis did, "selected biographies of women who fought alongside men during the heroic period of Islamic history, and presented them to women as role models to emulate. Thus, in the 1950s, women were rekindling a tradition that had been established before them" (Lazreg 1994, 137).

3. The French tried to exploit these women's leadership roles. Ben Bouali and Buhrayd had unveiled and others were following their lead. The French assumed that this unveiling represented a victory for their culture, and on 16 May 1958 they assembled some village women and brought them into Algiers where they arranged for the women to be publicly unveiled. As a result, many women who had long since unveiled chose to reveil as a symbol of nationalist solidarity. As Lazreg notes, this demonstration orchestrated by the French had a long-term negative impact on women's self-awareness, as women were pushed further into subsuming their needs and desires to those of the nation (Lazreg 1994, 135).

4. Another heroine, the sixteen-year-old Hassiba, marches off to war with Youssef (see Dejeux 1973, 250). In a factual account, an ex-prisoner described her time in detention as follows: "The Oran prison was very tough. We had organized classes. Each did what she could. A seamstress revealed her secrets. . . . We taught all the Europeans Arabic, and to those Muslim women who were not too old we taught reading and writing. We also had philosophy classes. There were lectures on all sorts of topics, particularly politics. . . . There was complete solidarity among the women. There was no distinction between us, no difference of opinion about the future as though we had belonged to the same milieu for a long time" ("Femmes algériennes dans la guerre," El-Moudjahid, 72/3, 1 November 1960).

5. Interview by the author with Assia Djebar, Paris, October 1987. Cadi-Mostefai claims that Djebar's El-Moudjahid articles on the war (perhaps because they are propagandist) have no instances of such women traitors. These are "women who have found themselves. They have a job to do, a mission. For them the situation is clear. There are no problems" (Cadi-Mostefai 1978, 175, 185).

6. One of the first reviews interprets the novel quite differently, commending it for highlighting the "tragic complexity of a war between two peoples who have lived closely together over so long a period. Symbolically, during a night together, a young rebel and his cousin read and recite the poetry of Hugo and Rimbaud. It is implied that out of the disruption of society brought about by the revolution, and out of the new responsibilities undertaken by women as well as men, a world of greater intimacy for both is emerging" ( Jeune Afrique , 3-9 December 1962, 26-27).

7. Lazreg recounts--without making the connection--what appears to be a source for this story. She quotes Hubertine Auclert's 1900 Les femmes arabes en Algérie where an unnamed French administrator "caught sight of a beautiful woman, Nedjma [even the spelling is the same], wife of a Mr. Lakhdar [who is Nedjma's half brother and lover in Yacine's version], and fell in love with her. On the advice of his friend Chaya, a money lender, the administrator framed Lakhdar . . . and exiled him to Noumea, Niger. Nedjma was thus appropriated along with Lakhdar's thoroughbred mare, Rihana" (Lazreg 1994, 49). In quotations from Nedjma I translate from the 1956 French edition.

8. He first published Le cadavre encerclé in Esprit in 1954 and 1955; four years later it appeared with two other plays in a volume entitled Le cercle de représailles. The French director Jean-Marie Serreau (1915-73) put on the play in Carthage, Brussels, and Paris, even as the war in Algeria was raging. In the third play, Les ancêtres redoublent de férocité , Nedjma is widowed and crazy like her mother, but also like the heroines of the war about whom others, like Assia Djebar, would later write (see discussion below). As early as the mid-1940s Yacine had written a poem entitled "Nedjma ou le poème ou le couteau." In his introduction to the English translation of Nedjma , Bernard Aresu describes the poem as evoking "separation and death but [also] ancestral memory" (Yacine 1991, xxxiii).

9. He wrote a play entitled "La Kahina" that was performed in 1985. He titled his preface to Yasmina Mechakra's Grotte éclatée "Les enfants de la Kahina." These descendants of the early woman warrior included women like Mechakra, who had ''le don de la parole" (Mechakra 1986 [1979], 8).

10. Yacine entitled the first part of Le polygone étoilé "La femme sauvage." This section was published in Tunis in 1961 a year after Yacine had read it out over Zagreb radio (see Aresu's introduction to the 1991 English ed. of Nedjma , xxiii).

11. This is not to say that Yacine was himself afraid of or ill disposed toward Algerian women fighters. His enthusiastic preface to Mechakra's La grotte éclatée echoes Emile Habibi's praise of women's participation in the Palestinian resistance (see chapter four): "Now that the Aurès insurrection has given birth to a new Algeria, this book must be read and reread so that there be others, so that others raise their voices. Right now, in our country, a woman who writes is worth her weight in gunpowder." (Mechakra 1986 [1979], 8).

12. In 1993 Ahlem Mosteghanemi published Dhakirat al-jasad (Body memory), a novel that contains several intertextual references to Malek Haddad's war novels (see Mosteghanemi 1993, 30, 310, 375) as well as to Kateb Yacine's Nedjma (see 324-28). It is as though the author were establishing a direct link with the men's war stories. The language of the text is very important, and the heroine, who is herself a novelist, says: "Arabic is the language of my heart, it is the only language in which I can write. We write in the language in which we feel" (91). Body Memory is about an Algerian artist and his anguished relationship with an Algeria "that is exploding and we are no longer able to avoid uniting with the embers flying out of its mouth and to forget our own little fire" (23). The reality of this Algeria, with its religious extremism (306), destroys the dreams of those who live in exile (283). Algeria since the 1980s has suffered from the violence perpetrated by militant Islamists who killed Khalid's brother when he dared finally to dream (395). What difference, Khalid asks, is there between the French, the Israelis, and the Algerians? (396). Khalid is a veteran of the war of liberation who lives in Paris. He was imprisoned on 8 May 1945, the day that 50,000 other students were taken prisoner, among them Kateb Yacine. Later Khalid was wounded in the fighting, lost an arm, and began to paint as a form of therapy. The daughter of his martyred commander attends the opening of one of his shows and he becomes infatuated with her as a woman and particularly as a symbol for what Algeria has become since the war. The novel ends with her marriage to a corrupt Algerian official who stands in stark contrast with her former lover, a Palestinian poet. Khalid is invited to the wedding; he surmises that they need him to counteract the "plague of corruption" that has infected them all in the police state that Algeria has become (188, 272), where the government uses funds designated for religious purposes, for instance the pilgrimage to Mecca, to sponsor unethical business deals (305).

13. Interview with Djebar, Paris, October 1987.

14. For example, the Arabic teacher "denounced by his djellaba that seemed to retain in its folds his dusty theology" (Djebar 1967, 386).

15. The third volume, Vaste est la prison , came out in 1995 just as this manuscript was going to press. Djebar said of this volume that it was about relationships with mothers, whereas Fantasia was about relationships with fathers (telephone conversation with the author, 17 April 1995).

16. Anne Donadey describes Djebar's method as "mimicry" as the French feminist Luce Irigaray uses it: "Irigaray posits that it is first through their deliberate repetition of a male discourse of female representation that women will be able to reappropriate language. This repetition will be subversive because of its difference: spoken from a different position, it might extend into the realm of parody. . . . For Irigaray, mimicry is a conscious strategy of resistance to hegemonic discourse, one which must be taken up 'délibérément,' and which points to a feminine elsewhere. . . . Djebar reappropriates the French archives on Algeria by using them as the palimpsest upon which she deciphers the trace of her people, especially the women" (Donadey 1993, 110-12).

1. John Brenkman recently wrote: "Citizens can freely enter the field of political persuasion and decision only insofar as they draw on the contingent vocabularies of their own identities. Democracy needs participants who are conversant with the images, symbols, stories, and vocabularies that have evolved across the whole of the history. . . . By the same token, democracy also requires citizens who are fluent enough in one another's vocabularies and histories to share the forums of political deliberation and decision on an equal footing" (Brenkman 1993, 89).

2. Interview by the author with Sahar Khalifa in Nablus, 29 May 1991. Rosemary Sayigh indicates that the "special difficulty of the Palestinian struggle, its imbalance of forces, means that women's part in institution building, artistic and literary production, professional work, or sumood (steadfastness) takes on a national importance. To limit our focus to 'organized' women is to miss another kind of struggle. . . . The slogan of 'organic unity' between the women's and the national movement was fundamental in legitimating women's political activism in the '60s and '70s" but then she adds, "it also repressed consciousness of their situation and history as women" (Sayigh 1987, 10).

3. Even Jean Genet, not noted for his interest in women, praised Palestinian women's political effectiveness in his posthumously published Prisoner of Love (Genet 1992, 3-4).

4. Sayigh discusses the lack of systematic documentation of women's activities and particularly of lack of attention to any such records as might exist (Sayigh 1987, 10).

5. Terry Atwan puts the number of women jailed during the Intifada at 1,500 ("Life Is Struggle Inside and Outside the Green Line," in Palestinian Women: Identity and Experience , ed. Ebba Augustin [London: Zed Press, 1993], 57). Ahmad Dahbur wrote a poem entitled "You" in 1977 where he also refers to the Intifada: "For out people in the occupied territories . . . and for their great intifada/I remember the stone which my mother threw during the latest demonstration."

6. Among the names of women mentioned to me during a visit to the West Bank in the summer of 1991 are Hanan Awwad (poetry), Halima Jauhar (short stories), Basima Hallawa (short story), Nahida Nazzal (memoirs from prison), Samia al-Khalili (poetry), Khaula 'Uwayda al-Labadi (short story), Dima Samman (novel), Samira al-Sharabati (poetry; Hadi Daniel criticized for her not being political enough and for copying Nizar Qabbani). In Israel, Siham Dawud and Muna Abu 'Id (poetry).

7. Discussing a conference on the Intifada and women's issues in Jerusalem in December 1990, Basem Tawfeeq anticipates Rita Giacaman's fears. He writes that though the Intifada's first six months "witnessed a breaking of class, gender, religion and age barriers . . . the second phase returned women to their previous traditional roles. . . . Females became 'marginalized, then the Intifada set the stage' for a regression in women's rights . . . the nationalist leadership (a woman in the audience volunteered) use us as a media front" (Tawfeeq 1990, 8).

8. "Interview of the Month" between Farah and the poet Mahmud Darwish in Al-Jadid , April-May 1962.

9. Women writers like Samira 'Azzam, who left in 1948, wrote politically throughout. In "On the Road to Solomon's Pools," 'Azzam writes of the emasculation of Palestinian society. During an attack, he takes his family away from the village. He alone holds the baby until it is killed in his arms. He deliberately loses his wife in the crowd of refugees so as to be able to bury the son himself and alone, giving the mother no part in the family tragedy even when her child dies (story included in Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns 1994, 18-22).

10. Other Palestinian women writers' works also were introduced by men: e.g., Samih al-Qasim introduced Fadwa Tuqan's A Mountainous Journey; Samih Semah introduced Siham Dawud's anthology And So, I Sing (1979). A committee of three men--Muhammad Sulaiman, Mundhir Amir, and Samih Sammara--chose Dawud's poems from 1973 volumes of Al-Ghad and Al-Ittihad and she learned of the anthology after it was published.

11. See negative examples in "The Jailhouse" and "The Eldest Son" (Farah 1954, 71-81; 110-21). In "The Café Wise Man," another story from the collection, the waiter Hasan is fired after a rich client he accuses of not paying his bill accuses him of theft. The café wise man gives Hasan the half guinea the rich man claims to have paid with instructions to tell the owner that he had just found it under the table. The owner warns Hasan that ''in future he should keep his eyes open to see the coins that were paid him." Hasan bites his tongue: "Can people only believe us if we are rich and wear elegant suits?'' When Hasan tries to repay the wise man, the latter refuses despite his own need. Even when the rich man is exposed for gambling with his workers' wages, Hasan can do nothing. The story concludes wistfully: whenever an elegant suit enters the café, Hasan avoids serving its owner (50-58).

12. In "Regret," yet another story from the 1954 collection, Farah mocks the affectation of the use of French names and the interjection of foreign words like manicure and tennis into Arabic speech (40, 41). This kind of criticism was not new. Men like Iskandir Khuri al-Baytjalli had been saying the same things since the 1920s (see Peled 1988, 184).

13. We can read of the very same debauchery in the pre-1948 "Be Kind to the Children" (Farah 1954, 50-51).

14. For example, Hana Ibrahim's "The Tenth Anniversary Celebration" (1958) and "Infiltrators" (late 1950s); and Ghassan Kanafani's "Return to Haifa (1969).

15. Somekh divides the Palestinian depiction of Jews into three types: "The first (and the least frequent) kind is a description of Jews, in isolation, with no connection to the fate of the Arab population. . . . The second theme . . . is that in which contemporary Jewish society appears as opposed to Arab society, in confrontation or by comparison. Arab society is described as still backward, lagging behind the modern world, whereas Jewish society is shown as dynamic. . . . The third kind, and the most important: stories describing the bitter fate of the Arab population in Israel, while at the same time reflecting the partial or complete identification of Jewish individuals, simple people or intellectuals, with the sufferings of the Arabs. It should be noted that such stories . . . were generally written by Communist authors" (Somekh 1989, 116-17).

A striking example of a Palestinian writing about an Israeli is the poet Mahmud Darwish, who composed verses to Rita, his childhood friend and later lover whom the 1967 war tore from him for military service. 'Ab-dallah al-Shahham wonders why Darwish should write such poetry and surmises that Darwish may have wanted to prove that "he was more of a humanitarian than all of them because he enjoyed broader horizons, he was prepared for a dialogue with his enemy." He quotes the poet as having said: "I do not hate the Jews [but rather Zionism, which] is based on violence and militarism. . . . The more Rita is in love, the more she relinquishes Zionism" (al-Shahham 1988, 28-35).

16. Ibn Khaldun writes that some readers interpreted this story to advocate passivity and a dangerous acceptance of injustice and pain (editorial in Al-Jadid , April 1957, 22).

17. For sumud , says Jean Makdisi, "there is no single English sound-and-sense equivalent that I know of; rather it would have to be rendered by tapping the thesaurus' rich repository--tenacity, steadfastness, resolution, endurance, indomitability--all these words together, with their overlapping shades of meaning, give a sense of that noble word, assoumoud " (Makdisi 1990, 175).

18. The 1955 January issue of Al-Jadid published an editorial that demanded rights for women "so that they may fight side by side with men to destroy the chains of oppression" (6).

In a report presented at the symposium on the status of Israeli Arab women in Haifa on 7 March 1982, Miriam Mari distinguishes three stages in women's growing feminist consciousness (though she does not so identify it): (1) 1948-56, "when compulsory education laws brought many Arab girls into the schools"; (2) 1956-67, "when more Arab women began to work outside the villages, and, in some cases, came under the progressive influence of Mapam and the kibbutzim"; (3) post-1967 economic and academic opportunities (quoted in Tessler 1982, 6).

19. Hana Ibrahim's story "Rebel" ( Al-Jadid , February 1956) tells the story of a blind girl who uses her miraculously regained sight to escape from everyone she knew, who persecuted her because of her sex and handicap.

20. While I was in the West Bank during the summer of 1991, I was given copies of stories by women that the Israeli censors had banned. They include Hanin 'Adnan Hindiya's "Al-janna al-da'i'a" and Khaula 'Uwayda al-Labadi's "Al-nabadat al-khalida."

21. In 1991 Najwa Qa'war Farah, who is now based in Amman, published a collection of short stories entitled Intifadat al-'asafir that openly indicts the Israeli occupation. Most of her protagonists are men who are trying to get back to the homeland to see family or to fight in the resistance. Farah is uncompromising about the evil of collaborators, as in "Memoir of an Ex-convict."

22. Khalifa tells of the difficulties she encountered trying to publish Al-subar (translated into English as Wild Thorns ). First she tried two publishers in Beirut, one Lebanese and the other Palestinian. Both ultimately felt it was too dangerous to publish. Then she took the manuscript to Cairo but found the publisher who was interested in it too insistent on changing the language, particularly the Palestinian colloquialisms. Upon her return to the West Bank, she was offered a contract by a joint Israeli-French publishing house. In 1976 the book came out simultaneously in Arabic, Hebrew, and French (Khalifa 1989).

23. Abu Hiyad in Muhammad Ayyub's Al-kaff tunatihu al-makhraz (Amman, 1987) says, "Where does the sumud money go? Who is the beneficiary? Do the poor get anything? The rich are steadfastly holding on to their wealth. They are the ones whose pockets are big enough to contain the sumud money."

24. Khalifa wrote Sunflower after having conducted one-to five-hour-long interviews with over fifty educated men (Khalifa 1989).

25. Khalifa repeats this plea almost verbatim in her next novel, Memoirs , 96.

26. For single women, according to Suha Sabbagh, "Since 1967, female employment has increased from 8.4% to 24.8% in 1980 . . . women who suddenly found themselves single heads of households were chastised by other women for departing from traditional modes of behavior by virtue of their new-found responsibility" (Sabbagh 1989, 75). A couple of Palestinian women whom Shaaban interviewed on women's independence said, "Arab societies under Israeli occupation preserve both the bad and the good for fear of losing their identity . . . sexually liberated women could in an instant turn into prostitutes in men's eyes; their sexuality remains a potential source of shame and social disgrace and it is still the most accessible means men have of subjugating them" (Shaaban 1988, 140, 162).

27. "Collaborators with the occupation were encircled and gradually rendered ineffective, as the entire mass of people under occupation came together in a block that opposed occupation" (Said 1989, 37).

28. Khalifa wrote Memoirs within six months, immediately upon completing Sunflower in 1979 but published the novel only six years later, on the eve of the Intifada (interview, Nablus, 29 May 1991).

29. Snitow writes: "The urgent contradiction women constantly experience between the pressure to be a woman and the pressure not to be one will change only through a historical process; it cannot be dissolved through thought alone. . . . The category woman is a fiction; then, post-structuralism suggests ways in which human beings live by fictions; then, in its turn, activism requires of feminists that we elaborate the fiction woman as if she were not a provisional invention at all but a person we know well, one in need of obvious rights and powers. Activism and theory weave together here, working on what remains the same basic cloth, the stuff of feminism" (Snitow 1989, 46-47).

30. When 'Afaf is accused of being from the oppressors' class, she retorts: "The oppressors' class has oppressed me" (Khalifa 1986, 51).

31. For a discussion of the constructive role of abortion in war, see the editors' introductory essay in Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier 1989, 9-24.

32. "My silence under such circumstances would drive him crazy and make him wish to destroy" (Khalifa 1986, 78-79). After Fadwa Tuqan tells her mother about her imagined adventures, she is warned that she may be going crazy. Thereafter, Fadwa keeps her world to herself and continues to escape there for the rest of her life (Tuqan 1990 [1984], 58-59, 116). In Hanan al-Shaykh's The Story of Zahra , the protagonist's behavior and others' reactions to her are identical. Zahra also seeks refuge in the bathroom when others press in too closely.

33. In his review of the book in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Safir , 26 February 1991, Nadim Tawfiq Jarjura claimed that Bab al-Saha is a search for the answer to the question, who is allowed to kill? He sees the novel as Khalifa's attempt to "pierce the barrier between literature and reality. . . . As though literature has become necessary self-criticism." It was also a challenge to the author to see if "fiction could render the truth of what was happening in Palestinian society?" He quotes Khalifa as having said that the Intifada, unlike most experiences that need time for their articulation, had to be recorded at once. She had decided to focus on one aspect: the collaborators and their executions.

34. When 'Afaf's father discovers her in a cave with some young men preparing explosives, he is torn between shock at the flounting of social imperatives and pride in his daughter's nationalism: "But the family's honor! So he went from area to area and from café to café, saying, 'My daughter is honorable. My daughter is clean. My daughter is doing what men do.' The story got around until the governor heard about it and they arrested the revolutionaries and they beat one of them who could not stand it and he confessed from the first blow, another from the second blow" (Khalifa 1986, 137; cf. 6, 56).

35. Khalifa told me that Husam represents the Palestinian leadership and that she had "wounded him, crippled him so that all the lessons would pass in front of him consciously and unconsciously. Although he had at first advised Nuzha to go to the United States, by the time he has been with her for an extended period he advises her to stay. His previous rejection has turned into acceptance as he synthesized all these lessons and became wiser" (interview, Nablus, 29 May 1991).

36. Khalifa called Ahmad "a victim of the nationalist movement that cannot reeducate its cadre" (interview, Nablus, 29 May 1991).

37. Parallels from Djebar's revisionist Algerian text: "Abdelkader [narrator's and martyr's elder brother] and the partisans began to upbraid me: 'Your brother Ahmed died a martyr! We shall be happy to enjoy a similar end" (Djebar 1993, 130).

Abu Samra writes self-evidently of these ululations that women emit at a martyr's funeral. One woman refused to cry at her son's funeral, saying "Instead of weeping today everyone should ululate because today is Taysir's wedding" (Abu Samra 1989, 29). This transformation of a martyr's funeral into a wedding is repeated by other mothers. One said that she felt that "This wedding-funeral is better than the wedding of his marriage" (30). One martyr before dying had said to his mother: ''We must sacrifice ourselves because Palestine is a bride with a very expensive dowry. How can we get her without paying the price?" (33).

38. In Al-mutarada (the pursued), Raja' Abu Ghazzala creates women who are frustrated by the men in their lives. Particularly striking is the short story "The Mad Woman's Tree." Two women meet after fifteen years' separation and review what they have accomplished during the intervening years. One of them remembers that she had wanted to "become a psychiatrist so as to be able to treat the boys of the alley for their superiority complex, their machismo and their aggression against the girls." Her companion reproaches her for not executing her plan, because all the men she knew needed help; they were "sick with love of power and tyranny. . . . We don't need one woman psychiatrist, we need an army" (Abu Ghazzala 1988, 33, 41). She denounces Anisa for allowing herself to become a pawn between her father and her husband. Anisa knows that this is true, but all she can do is paint violent paintings that no one understands. What is the use of art if it is directed at a society that is not ready to understand its message?

39. In her August 1991 letter, Khalifa writes, "the act of burning the flag of occupation is not an act of killing or violence, is it? It is a symbol of opposing oppression, an act of resistance, no? At least, this is how I think about it as a Palestinian citizen, even though I am a woman and a feminist."

40. According to Giacaman, "Women's traditional roles as homemakers are now imbued with new significance, as Palestinian society moves towards self-reliance through small-scale food production in order to cut dependency on imports" (Giacaman 1988b, 1).

41. "It is only in writing and by writing that the writer can be said to exist at all. The 'writer' is what exists in the interior of the activity of 'writing' . . . actions and their effects are conceived to be simultaneous; past and present are integrated rather than disrupted, and the subject and object of the action are in some way conflated" (White 1992, 179-87).

1. The General Federation of Iraqi Women (GFIW) was founded in 1968 "to promote the status of women and to cooperate with international women's organizations" under the aegis of the Baath Party. Doreen Ingrams describes it as a "pressure group which can influence the Government to bring in reforms for the welfare of women." Among its achievements are the policing and prosecution of violations of women's rights, the widespread establishment of childcare facilities and women-run farms, and the assurance of decision-making positions for women throughout the bureaucracy (Ingrams 1983, 104-15). See also Abdel-Ghani 1980.

2. It has been easier--although not easy--to write critically of the war from outside. Before Kanaan Makiya revealed his name, he used the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil in order to say what he wanted about the Iraqi government and its war. Samira al-Mana has lived in London since the 1970s. Although most of her stories deal with the problems of exiles, her 1990 novel entitled Habl al-surra (The umbilical cord) takes on the Iran-Iraq War. The protagonist, 'Afaf, calls it "that terrible war" with its "rockets, poisonous gases, chemical weapons, destruction" and corpses floating on the waters of the Shatt al-'Arab and the Gulf. She writes of threats to the lives of Iraqis suspected of having Iranian blood. She describes the oppressiveness of life in Iraq, a place that the war has drained and turned into a desert: ''travel is forbidden, letters get lost . . . everything is forbidden" (al-Mana 1990, 27-28). But the horror of the war is not restricted to Iraq; its terror can be felt in London. 'Afaf's uncle is visiting her from Iraq. The reunion is not joyful but plagued with suspicions. One day an agent calls. He had been waiting in anguish of this telephone call that would make him do the unthinkable: he has been ordered to kill his son who had escaped from the front. 'Afaf flashes back to the "photograph of a hanging that Arabic and British newspapers in London had published. It was of a father being awarded the Tigris and Euphrates medal, the most important medal in Iraq, because he had killed one of his sons who had escaped from the army. The medal honored the father as a symbol and a role model for all Iraqis. Her uncle raved on about this horrifying story and then asked: ''What's the importance of the country without children? What's Iraq's importance without my children?" (133).

3. In several other stories in this collection, the war is called "the certain death" and it is described as "taking away our children" (cf. 66).

4. This is the case for other stories by Sa'id: the end of Al-ihtiraq (The burning) also is inconsistently patriotic. After the narrator's reluctance to fight, he is suddenly charging to the forefront.

5. In July 1994 during a visit to Urbana, Illinois, I talked with an Iraqi grocer about some of these writers. I wanted to know if any of them were known, real even. He was surprised to hear me mention Faysal 'Abd al-Hasan Hajim because they were from the same town just west of Baghdad. The Hajims are a well-known literary family.

6. The critic 'Abdallah Ibrahim explains that this generic naming of characters is common in Iraqi war novels. He claims that its function is to subordinate the character to the action (Ibrahim 1988, 88).

7. See discussion about Tim O'Brien's Vietnam novel, The Things They Carried (1990), in chapter one.

8. The state invoked medieval Iraqi writers as popular figures to "play upon the theme that the greatness of the Abbasid empire in its early days stemmed from its purely Arab quality and that its decline began once it was adulterated by the influx of minorities, such as the Persians and the Turks" (Davis and Gavrielides 1991, 132, 137, 139).

9. Basim 'Abd al-Hamid Hammudi accuses Moosa of plagiarizing 'Umar Muhammad al-Talib's Al-qissa al-'iraqiya 'ala al-jabha al-'iraqiya (Iraqi fiction at the Iraqi front [Baghdad, 1983]) and quotes passages to prove his point (Hammudi 1986, 45-48). Not having had access to al-Talib, I do not know whether Hammudi is overstating the case--Moosa does after all mention al-Talib's work in several places in his lecture ("Love, Death, Honor: Major Themes in Recent Iraqi Short Fiction," Marbid Festival 1985).

10. During the Lebanese civil war, women developed a new genre of journalistic prose poem they called the billet (Cooke 1988, 60-66).

11. For an English translation of the story, see Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns 1994.

12. 'Adil 'Abd al-Jabbar writes that the soldier refusing to give up the fight has become a major topos of the Iraqi war story (Hammudi 1986, 162).

13. Ibrahim writes that the War Story is typically divided between the front and somewhere else far away, and he goes on to quantify relationships that military men had with people away from the front: marriage 15 percent; love 42 percent; sex 7 percent; father 9 percent; child 12 percent; friend or colleague 12 percent. In other words, relationships with women amount to 64 percent (Ibrahim 1988, 59, 151).

14. Stanley Rosenberg writes that pilots' narratives from World War II evince neurosis that they combated with "such mechanisms as splitting, denial, projection, compartmentalization, and reversal of affect. These processes of distortion and self-alienation permitted the participants to live with death (their own potential death, their comrades' deaths, the deaths of the victims of their bombs, cannon, and napalm) as if death were not real" (Rosenberg 1993, 60).

15. The problem of distance from target is increasing, as we saw during the Gulf War. Pilots saw a burst of fireworks on a screen and because their missions were so closely monitored, their bombs so smart, and their opponent so weak, they were in general spared the "anxiety" and fright, but also the consequent thrill, eroticism, and effectiveness. On 5 February 1991 J. Ledbetter reported in The Village Voice what has now become common knowledge: "pilots aboard the USS John F. Kennedy told AP that they'd been watching porn movies before bombing missions" (80).

16. The actual title Ababil means flocks of birds ( tayr ababil ) and comes from the Qur'an (Elephant sura, 105:3); the birds were supposed to have launched the equivalent of an aerial attack on the enemies of the Muslims. Saddam Hussein called "his new missile hijarat ababil, or flying stones," which he used against Israel during the Gulf War (Makiya 1993, 267).

17. After I met Edgerton and gave him a copy of an earlier version of this chapter, he sent me two pages that he told me were "the old ending of the story." In it, the male narrator who is a pilot imagines himself to be a pregnant woman.

18. Abouali Farmanfarmaian discusses an attempt at exploiting fantasies during the Gulf War. The eroticization of wives served as a kind of familial presentation of fantasy to American military men. "Operation Desert Cheer" took photographs of "soldier's wives half-nude, lace-clad, and sent the pictures to the husbands in the Gulf. For a military more than ever made up of family people, this can uphold fantasies without leaving the parameters of the family." He does not say what happened when these men returned home (Farmanfarmaian 1992, 133).

19. This remembering of a man's possessiveness once he has gone can be found in other women's writings on war, for example, Nuha Samara's "Two Faces One Woman" and Sa'adiya in Sunflower (see chapter 4).

20. "Son of my soul and foster son of the sorrows of the war. . . . Had God and the war not granted this beautiful boy to me, I would have dried up like a tree whom poisoned winds had scorched."--that is, war's victim helped her.

21. The internal opposition joined in a coalition of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in late 1992. Their offices were in Salaheddin, where they employed Kurds, Arabs, Turkomans, and Assyrians. The local paper was published in Salaheddin and "20,000 to 30,000 copies are smuggled into government-controlled territory and distributed weekly in Baghdad and other cities. . . . The INC has infiltrated and circulated other opposition literature, such as statements, pamphlets, and posters, to the great anger of the government and the Baghdad media" ( INC Newsletter, spring 1994).

22. 'Abdallah refers to the Iraq-Iran War, but without naming it: it gave her some war experience to prepare her for what she was now having to go through; it was the reason they moved from Basra to Baghdad; she remembers watching TV during that war and seeing "mutilated corpses distributed throughout the mountains and valleys; swollen corpses with broken limbs floating on the waters, with crushed skulls and without heads." She remembers "the black posters we found in every street and alley throughout the years of the Eight-Year War announcing martyrs" ('Abdallah 1994, 114, 49, 88, 108). I thank Ghada al-Samman for sending me a copy of this book.

23. My thanks go to Nathalie Mansour, who sent me a copy of this book.

1. Henri Zghaib's comments occurred during the Lebanese literature panel at the annual convention of the Middle East Studies Association in Durham, N.C., 13 November 1993. Mai Ghossoub writes: "Je crois que c'est cela être libanaise: une appartenance multiple, cette possibilité de vivre notre individualité, tout en sachant l'agencer avec les exigences de nos grandes familles, et cela quel que soit notre lieu de résidence" (Ghossoub 1993).

2. Anderson defines official nationalism as an "anticipatory strategy adopted by dominant groups which are threatened with marginalization or exclusion from an emerging nationally imagined community. . . . [Its policy levers are] compulsory state-controlled primary education, state-organized propaganda, official rewriting of history, militarism . . . and endless affirmations of the identity of dynasty and nation. . . . Such official nationalisms were conservative, not to say reactionary, policies, adapted from the model of the largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded them" (Anderson 1991, 101, 110).

3. Evelyne Accad points out, however, that even at this earliest, "positive" stage, nationalism was not all good. During colonial rule to segregate, seclude, or veil one's women was proof that one was honorable and of superior culture. Nor did the exploitation of women in nationalist ideology stop beyond the first, "good" stage. Women were asked to fight for their country that they had been made to represent and that they were then asked to reproduce (Accad 1993).

4. For a discussion of the differences between imagining and inventing nations, see John A. Hall, "Nationalisms: Classified and Explained," Daedalus 122, no. 3 [1993]: 4.

5. Gellner writes that nationalism focused on individual agency is "held together above all by a shared culture, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves" (Gellner 1988, 57).

6. Aijaz Ahmad rejects the automatic reduction of third world literature to "the unitary insignia of nationalism and then to designate this nationalism as the determinate and epochal ideology for cultural production in non-Western societies" (Ahmad 1992, 243). See also Cooke 1987, 277-96.

7. The Freikorps writers "desire a father--a man less weak than their own fathers were in reality. . . . While real fathers are silenced by the soldier males, their texts express unmistakable desires for better ones" (Theweleit 1987-89, 2:369).

8. Absence as the ingredient essential to productive longing is in marked contrast to Rashid al-Daif, who claimed in an interview that when he said, "'From your absence comes the evening' I express the anguish of losing my beloved. This anguish is similar to that caused by war." It is a fear of losing the nation that he articulates in a poem: "WATANI (my nation / You've lost your W / You've lost your A / You've lost your T / You've lost your N." All that is left is the I that in Arabic denotes the first person singular possessive pronoun. All that is left is the possessing, not the belonging, individual (quoted in Takieddine-Amyouni 1993, 2).