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Women, Writing, and Political Detention

Barbara Harlow Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992.292 pages.

$17.95 paper. ISBN 0-8195-5249-6 $40 cloth. ISBN 0-8195-6258-0

Review by Marilyn Booth, Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

n Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention, Barbara I Harlow comments, “Human rights reporting entails both docu- mentation and intervention” (p. 244). In this wide-ranging medita- tion on the ways oppositional political organizing and state suppres- sion of it intersect with the gendered and classed organization of societies in a closely interdependent world, Harlow follows her own dictum. Stressing the importance of naming names, of putting the absent and the disappeared at the center, of highlighting specific histories of detention and resistance, the book seeks redress as well as analysis, and declares its own engagement throughout.

Indeed, by starting with an examination of prison and univer- sity as state institutions constructed to contain and silence opposi- tional political visions, Barred implicitly questions the institutional site of its own production and dissemination. For “prison education” (literacy programs started by Palestinians in Israeli prisons, the encounters of South African intellectuals with shebeen queens), not that of the university, Ufunctions to undermine the very walls and

premises that contain it” (p. 23). And it is prison writing, Harlow insists, that provides the most far-reaching critique of both the prison system and the society of which it is a microcosm: of the institution of literature as taught in the academy, and of the methodology of resistance. The literature from and of detention which Harlow summons does not constitute representations of prison so much as agents within and around it:

In prison, ... the counter strategies of reading and writ- ing, a circumstantial necessity outside, are further exercised and developed as critical weapons in the struggle itself. The theoretical and practical reconstruc- tion of the site of political prison as a ‘university’ for the resistance ... is more than a literary topos or metaphoric embellishment in the writings of political detainees, whether from occupied Palestine, South Africa, El Sal- vador, Northern Ireland, or the United States (p. 5).

It is these societies, plus Egypt, that Harlow focuses on, one by one in her second part, bringing in other locales and national identities briefly. She takes up a particular thematic-political focus for each geographical one: the ways narrative counters a hegemonic discourse and takes control of the historical narrative for the Palestinian resistance; the intersections between the state’s at- tempts to delegitimize political organizations and its moves to depoliticize women activists in Ireland; how divisions and bureau- cratic definition contain resistance in Egypt; crises of subjectivity engendered by detainment and expulsion practices in South Africa; the manipulation of “witne~s” and the challenge of personal narra- tives, especially those by women, to the rhetoric of “development” in El Salvador; the criminalization and hence attempted silencing of political opposition in the United States.

Throughout, Harlow’s juxtapositions of a range of texts-nov- els, testimonies, poetry, film, autobiographies, human rights docu- mentation-are organized by the question of what gender has to do with theorizing and practicing resistance, both inside and outside of prison and in the writings of both women and men. This is one way in which Harlow reminds us of the pervasiveness of political deten- tion, how it is anything but isolated from the society “at large,” wherever we live. How women activists tend to reorder hierarchies of resistance-and thereby of the whole society-is a theme that runs throughout. Harlow sees these reorderings as counter strate- gies to the attempted “domestication” of politically active women by both the state and the oppositional organization. Particularly inter-

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esting to students of Arab societies will be Harlow’s discussion of how Palestinian women have manipulated notions of sharuf, how conventions of social life and of “literary” narrative are turned upside down through narratives of resistance. Harlow’s discussion of Egyptian prison literature is narrower, more selective, and less original than her work on Palestinian material, offering a rather straightforward history of political repression in Egypt and discuss- ing a few autobiographical works on prison that have drawn other scholars’ attention too.

Harlow has marshaled a mass of material, ranging across several languages and many national boundaries. At times her readings are so condensed as to preclude our participation in her analytic journeys, for example, in her reading of Mustafa Tiba’s epistolary work on being a prisoner in Egypt, or her description of Raymonda Tawil’s open letter to the imprisoned writer al-Mu- tawakki Taha. When she allows herself the space, her analyses are captivating (to use a perhaps inappropriate figure!) in their vivid- ness and appropriateness: her discussions of Omar Rivabella’s Requiem for a Woman’s Soul and Manlio Arguefa’s One Day of Life come to mind. Occasionally her points seem unsupported by the brief treatment she has offered. Is Umm Khadr’s autobiographical narrative (told by Raymonda Tawil) really a “biography of resis- tance” and if so, precisely how? Issues are raised that are never really addressed, such as the ‘lhigh arumass culture” divide or the question of the ideological and practical consequences of political prisoners’ fights to obtain special privileges (as in Northern Ire- land). Elsewhere, the distinctions made between “politicals” and “criminals” constitute a bureaucratic blockade that must be strug- gled against, distinctions that are consequential in theorizing and organizing cross-class opposition to the state. In general Harlow tends not to question the strategies and priorities of those with whom she eloquently “joins ranks” (p. xi) in this book -that “ ‘cast of characters’ who have been, explicitly and precisely for their intellectual and political work, removed from the premises” (p xi).

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