A Daughter of Palestine: the Short Fiction of Samirah Azzam.

Abstract

Samirah Azzam has been considered among the best-known and admired Palestinian women writers of the 1950s and 1960s. A prolific writer, she produced between 1952 and 1967 the material for five short story collections, and an unknown number of additional stories for her radio broadcasts. Although a variety of articles have been written about her by Arab critics, the majority do not treat the full corpus of her works nor do they analyze her technique or place in Arabic literature. She has not been the subject of full-length study in either English or Arabic. Following her sudden death, a number of her literary friends and critics organized a commemorative ceremony held at Beirut Arab University in December 1967. The Dar al-Aswar publishing house in her native city of Acre reprinted the collection al-Sa('c)ah wal-Insan in 1978. In 1971 the Dar al-('c)Awdah publishing house in Beirut gathered and published a posthumous collection entitled al-('c)ld min al-Nafidhah al-Gharbiyyah, which was reprinted in 1982 with some additional material. Noteworthy scholarship appearing in 1972, 1975 and 1981 all indicate continuing interest in Azzam's writing. Azzam made contributions to the Arabic and Palestinian short story when the earlier romantic themes and styles were being ab and oned in favor of realism. Political themes in fictional writing were then being encouraged, as was socialist ideology. All of this is evident in Azzam's stories, most of which dealt with characters her critics found to be ordinary and true to life. The author was fond of recording her culture in the speeches and mannerisms of her characters, although her use of the colloquial dialect was rare. She became identified with women's concerns, but was as likely to write about men as she was to write about women. Her stories contain characterizations of strong and independent female characters of all ages, and include many stories about young people and the elderly. Azzam's writings provide deep insight into her personal experi- ence and into the environment in which she lived. With unique clarity, her stories introduce the reader to what it meant to be a child in Palestine, an exiled woman in the Arab world at large, and a writer and intellectual in Beirut and Lebanon in the change and optimism-filled years of the fifties and sixties.