Evelyne Accad
Wounding Words: A Woman’s Journal in Tunisia
Trans. Cynthia T. Hahn
Portsmouth: Heinemann, African Writers Series, 1996. Pp. 183
Reviewed by John Eustace

Evelyne Accad’s third novel, Wounding Words: A Woman’s Journal in Tunisia, holds great promise, but ultimately fails ideologically and aesthetically. While the book radiates warmth on occasion, and while it has the potential to provoke thought, it does neither particularly effectively for one basic reason: Accad seems to have been unsure whether she was writing a philosophical treatise or a novel. These are by no means mutually exclusive forms. Indeed, they are complementary when yoked together with skill and subtlety. Accad’s novel (or is it the translation?) manifests little of either, however.

The story, as the title and subtitle suggest, describes the personal and political contests invoked by the creation of a woman’s journal in the hostile patriarchal environment of Tunisia. The protagonist, Hayate, an expatriate Lebanese scholar attached to an American university, soon finds herself marginalized from the emerging feminist movement because of her ties to the neocolonial monolith, the United States. One of the few things that seems to unify the otherwise factionalized feminist movement is its resistance to American encroachments on the definitions of feminist subjectivity in the postcolonial world. The wounding words the women direct at each other-traceable, in great part, to a psychology engendered by patriarchy-gain force when used collectively against innocent Hayate. The story culminates in a divisive conference on the state of feminism in Tunisia, during which Tunisian presenters scornfully ignore Hayate as she delivers a paper tracing the development of feminism in the United States. Hayate leaves Tunisia with some fond memories but few friends in the feminist movement there. Accad thus analyzes the divisive nature of the feminist movement in the postcolonial world, calling for an inclusive discourse that acknowledges a common purpose beyond cultural and historical differences and that disavows personal political agendas in favor of the common good.

The novel’s political agenda recommends such a discourse. Its execution, however, undermines that agenda. In some areas, particularly in its poetic reflections, the novel is captivating. Mostly, however, one senses that one is reading notes that could inform a provoking novel. Accad overelaborates her political agenda, effectively interpreting significant events for her readers, removing their responsibility for negotiating the potential complexities of the story. An episode involving a hadra, or exorcism, exemplifies this tendency. The hadra is a fairly problematic space where gender boundaries are negotiated, at once patriarchal in that it turns women into scapegoats and therapeutic in that it allows women to escape “the burdens of everyday life” (65). Instead of representing this event subtly, asking readers to theorize the space for themselves, Accad theorizes it for them through Hayate’s observations: “The men are the actors in the exorcism. Are they not responsible for the dementia of the women they seek to exorcise? Has the oppression suffered by women not been engendered by the system of division and hierarchy? How is it that the women, being able to see what is happening on both sides, are not curious as she is, do not watch, do not rebel, but rather accept the role imposed on them?” (65). Here, the author seems to remove the responsibility of the readers by asking questions for them. A similar thing happens later in the novel when Hayate finally realizes that many of the Tunisian women had distanced themselves from her after she had thrown a party for them: “The party is a kind of hadra, or an inverse hadra. The hadra has the power to purify and heal; the pleasure of the party produces a guilt reaction-the remorse of having given oneself over to pleasure” (113). The text again invades the territory of the readers through this analytical epiphany. In drawing conclusions for them, the novel contradicts one of its most important ideological goals, the invitation to dialogue.

Accad’s incessant theorizations and concomitant academic style-one chapter boringly summarizes an academic conference-removes the novel’s potential for any sustained warmth. While I had no difficulty sympathizing with the characters intellectually, I had great difficulty sympathizing with them emotionally. And without that invitation to some form of emotional attachment with the characters-even aversion would have been welcome-I found myself a very disinterested reader, too annoyed with the craft to really engage with the issues.