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Literary Arts & Translation

Silenced by the Syllabus: The Arab Women Poets Reshaping Literature That US Universities Refuse to Assign

By الشاعر | Al-Shaer Literary Arts & Translation
Silenced by the Syllabus: The Arab Women Poets Reshaping Literature That US Universities Refuse to Assign

Walk into most introductory Arabic literature courses at American universities and you will find a familiar roster. Al-Mutanabbi. Abu Nuwas. Mahmoud Darwish. Nizar Qabbani, perhaps, if the syllabus ventures into the twentieth century. These are poets of genuine stature, and their inclusion is defensible. What is harder to defend is the near-total absence of contemporary Arab women poets from the same curricula — not because such poets do not exist, but because the institutional structures that determine what gets taught, translated, and reviewed have consistently failed to make space for them.

This is not a minor oversight. It is a pattern with consequences: for Arab-American students who find no reflection of their own literary inheritance in the classroom, for non-Arab readers whose understanding of Arabic literature remains frozen in a canon assembled largely by and for male voices, and for the poets themselves, whose work circulates in Arabic-language literary communities with considerable force while remaining almost entirely unknown in the United States.

Al-Shaer spoke with scholars, translators, and the poets themselves to understand how this exclusion operates — and to begin correcting it.

How the Canon Closes Its Doors

The mechanisms of exclusion are rarely overt. No committee convenes to decide that Arab women poets shall not be taught. The process is more diffuse, and in some ways more difficult to challenge for that reason.

Dr. Samira Haddad, a professor of comparative literature who has taught Arabic poetry at several US institutions and asked to be identified by a pseudonym due to departmental sensitivities, describes the dynamic with precision. "The syllabus is shaped by what has been translated, what has been reviewed in major journals, what has won prizes that Western publishers recognize, and what fits the narrative that Western audiences already hold about Arab culture," she says. "Contemporary Arab women poets often challenge all four of those criteria simultaneously. Their work is frequently untranslated, reviewed only within Arabic-language critical circles, operating outside Western prize structures, and refusing to confirm what Western readers expect Arab women to say."

That last point is significant. There is, as several poets and scholars interviewed for this piece noted, a specific type of Arab woman's voice that Western literary culture is prepared to receive: the voice of suffering, of escape, of gratitude for Western freedoms. Work that is formally ambitious, politically complex, or that refuses the posture of victimhood tends to find fewer Western champions.

Four Voices That Cannot Wait for the Curriculum to Catch Up

Rae Armanout has noted that the most radical contemporary poetry tends to arrive from places literary institutions are not watching. By that measure, the work of Jordanian poet Huda Haddad demands immediate attention. Writing in a spare, compressed Arabic that resists easy paraphrase, Haddad's recent collections explore female embodiment, urban alienation, and the politics of silence with a formal control that her Arabic-language critics have compared to the best of contemporary European poetry. None of her collections have been translated into English in full. Fragments circulate in small journals. She remains unknown to virtually all US university Arabic programs.

"I do not write to be translated," Haddad said in a recent interview published in a Beirut literary journal, a comment that was itself translated for this piece. "But I notice that certain kinds of Arabic writing find translators easily, and certain kinds do not. The ones that find translators quickly are the ones that confirm something the Western reader already believes."

Fadhila Al-Faruq, an Algerian poet writing in both Arabic and French whose work engages the unresolved trauma of the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, represents a different dimension of the exclusion. Her bilingualism itself creates problems for institutional categorization: too Arab for French literature programs, too Francophone for Arabic literature programs, and too politically specific for the generalized "world literature" courses that might otherwise include her. Her most celebrated collection, which has been described by Algerian critics as among the most important works of North African poetry in a generation, has never appeared in an English translation.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, a Palestinian-American poet based in Seattle, occupies a different position: she writes in English, she has published with US presses, and her work has been recognized by American literary institutions. Yet even she describes a persistent experience of marginalization within the spaces that ostensibly welcome her. "There is an appetite for Arab American poetry that performs a certain kind of grief, a certain kind of longing," she has said in public conversations. "When the work is formally experimental, or when it refuses to be elegiac, the reception changes." Her collections, which move between lyric essay, documentary poetics, and formal verse with considerable sophistication, remain absent from most Arabic literature syllabi, which tend not to consider English-language Arab-American work within their scope at all.

Mona Kareem, a Kuwaiti-American poet and translator, has perhaps done more than any other single figure to bridge the structural gap between Arabic-language contemporary poetry and US literary audiences. Her translations of the Kuwaiti poet Bader Abdulaziz brought a significant male voice into English; her own poetry, written in Arabic and increasingly in English, engages questions of statelessness, labor migration, and Gulf modernity with an intellectual rigor that is rare in any literary tradition. Kareem is one of the few contemporary Arab women poets who has achieved meaningful recognition in both Arabic and English literary circles — and even she describes the US academy as largely indifferent to her Arabic-language work.

Zeina Hashem Beck, a Lebanese poet now based in the United States, writes in English and Arabic with a formal range that encompasses the ghazal, the golden shovel, and invented hybrid forms. Her collection Louder than Hearts was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and her work has appeared in journals including Poetry Magazine. Yet her presence on Arabic literature syllabi remains minimal, in part because her English-language work is categorized as American poetry and her Arabic work as Lebanese poetry, and neither category is what most Arabic literature programs are designed to teach.

What the Gatekeepers Get Wrong

The scholars and poets interviewed for this piece offered a consistent diagnosis: the exclusion of contemporary Arab women poets from US curricula is not a matter of quality, but of category. The canon was built around a set of assumptions — about what Arabic literature is, what period it covers, who its subjects are — that contemporary women's writing tends to disrupt.

"Classical Arabic poetry is easier to teach in an American context because it is safely historical," Dr. Haddad observes. "It does not make claims on the present. Contemporary Arab women's poetry very much makes claims on the present, including claims about gender and power that some institutions find uncomfortable to center in a literature classroom."

The translation gap reinforces the exclusion. Without English translations, poets cannot be reviewed in major American literary publications, cannot be considered for prizes that drive institutional attention, and cannot enter the syllabi of the many Arabic literature courses taught by faculty whose primary language is English. The translation gap is not random: it reflects prior decisions about which voices are worth the investment of translation, decisions made by publishers, foundations, and literary organizations whose own diversity has historically been limited.

A Reading Guide for the Curious

For US readers ready to move beyond the assigned canon, the following entry points are a beginning:

The poets are not waiting for the curriculum to find them. The curriculum is simply late.