Generational differences in three Egyptian women writers: Finding a common ground

Postcolonial Egypt has witnessed significant cultural and political developments, and undoubtedly it has been a challenging era for writers attempting to negotiate a physical and ideological space within the public and private spheres. Ideologies of national self and national others have simultaneously been advocated and questioned by successive generations of contemporary women writers. In an era in which the conflict between a modern western-orientated narrative of the self is often pitted in direct opposition to an Islamic fundamentalist outlook on life, and used to polarize cultural differences in reductive ways, the modern Egyptian literary writer has an even greater challenge ahead of them. Three women writers, Latifa Zayyat, Ahdaf Soueif and Rehab Bassam, who have in different ways striven to restore the delicate balance between the personal and the public, represent three important modes of modernity. Where Zayyat focuses on the relationship of the whole to the self and the nation to the individual, Soueif focuses on the hybrid, the self and the other. Soueif’s work seeks to occupy a ground common to Arab and western culture alike. Rehab Bassam, on the other hand, initially began her literary career on weblogs. This new medium is reshaping our understanding of the dynamics of public and private, and is one that inevitably will influence how current modes of modernity are being shaped in contemporary Egyptian writing. The three writers attempt to find a common ground of cultural interaction between modern secularism, globalization and indigenous literary forms that can be developed into a meaningful communal narrative: present and future.