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Joumana Haddad Discusses Changing Western Perceptions of the Arab Woman
If you click on the official website of the Arabic cultural magazine “JASAD” (meaning Body) visitors are offered a key to enter the keyhole to eroticism.
The site, which is in both Arabic and English, covers international topics on the body. “The body is a quintessential part of the Arabs’ heritage and lives, yet we in the Arab world have come to veil it, ignore it or loathe it, as if it did not exist,” says Joumana Haddad.
Founded in December of 2008 by a Lebanese liberal poet and writer, the magazine’s logo uses the icon of a handcuff as a symbol to remove the constraints of their closed society, inviting its readers to explore erotic literature. The glossy quarterly cultural magazine is unprecedented in the Arab region and Arabic language, which specializes in the body arts, sciences and literatures. The project’s aim is to provide writers and artists freedom of thought, speech, and expression, says Haddad. “I truly and courageously hope it will play an essential part in widening the horizons of the Arabic cultural scene,” she said. ” JASAD deals with such social taboos as homosexuality, violence between men and women, nymphomania and honor killings.
Speaking before a full house in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan recently, the Lebanese poet and journalist said she never thought of herself as a social activist. The magazine’s founder insists that JASAD is playing a role by offering a place where writers can express themselves through a “serious cultural, intellectual, literary, scientific and artistic project.” One thing the high-gloss production is not, she says, is pornography.
The magazine discusses topics like intercourse, homosexuality, cannibalism, masturbation, self-mutilation, the porn industry, aphrodisiac recipes, sexual practices in exotic cultures, and erotic poems among other things. “I have never thought about myself as a messenger or having a role in the Arab region. Everything I did was out of personal passion and conviction. The magazine is playing a role in a difficult place to live in.”
Haddad believes in “naming the illness, then talking, discussing and expressing as the first step” to changing society. She encourages people “to look for their own source of inspiration, their own anger to allow us to question the life we are leading.”
The quarterly, which is published in Beirut in Arabic, avoids censors and religious leaders in the conservative Arab Islamic world and is distributed to subscribers in 84 countries worldwide through DHL and UPS as well as available online. The publication, which aims at “shattering Arab taboos on eroticism, sexuality, and everything having to do with the human body,” is sold at news stands in Lebanon in sealed bags and at Librairie Averroes in Paris and the Arabic Centre in London for about $10 and has a growing print circulation of 6,000. “Women don’t always find it easy to express themselves especially on issues relating to their bodies. I believe this magazine will be a good forum for them to finally talk freely about their bodies, including their sexuality,” said Haddad, who has been the editor of the cultural page of Lebanon’s “An Nahar” newspaper since 1997, and administrator of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, the Arabic equivalent of the prestigious Booker Prize.
Born in 1970 in Beirut, Haddad is first known for being a poet, a literary translator, and most recently as a magazine publisher and journalist. French-Moroccan writer Taher Ben Jalloun describes Haddad as “a unique voice in the Arabic literary world.”
Since the magazine’s inception two years ago, Haddad has gone through major challenges in putting out the magazine. She has had a falling out with a business partner due to editorial differences, received hate mail and complaints from religious authorities, and endured attempts by Hezbollah to close down the “JASAD” stand at a book fair in December 2008. “My friends advised me not to do it, as it was not the right time. Every time they said that, the more I wanted to push through with it. I love challenges and I’ve always believed that we need to create the time for anything,” said Haddad, who is Greek Orthodox Christian.
Fortunately for her, Lebanon is more open than other Arab societies in the Middle East. Haddad applied and received a license to publish a cultural magazine. Elsewhere, she says, you have to take it to a censorship committee. That is not the case in Lebanon where officials from the internal affairs ministry do not review the publication before it goes to print.
“JASAD” is a high quality, color publication of Arab writers using their own name. Reports include testimonials, articles, essays, and translations, covering the fields of literature, arts, and theater, and using a wide variety of photos, illustrations and paintings that revolve around the body.
Haddad insists that “JASAD” is not an imitation of the West and its widespread practice of explicit bodily expressions. The magazine is done “with your own culture, with your own words, with your own language, with your own writers, with your own artists. This in itself gives it the authenticity it needs.” While she admits no one is “pure” from Western influence today Haddad says “JASAD” is not “Playboy”. “I’m not the Hugh Hefner of the Arab world. I’m much more dangerous.”
In contrast to its first issue that presented a suggestive photo of a naked woman wrapped in a red silk dress, the quarterly magazine’s second cover showed a naked woman’s painted torso with a pair of hands covering her genitals.
Despite being banned in Saudi Arabia because it is seen as pornographic, the “JASAD” website is popular online. An article published on the online forum Muslimah Media Watch generated supportive comments from users. Haddad prefers paper to publishing electronically because she believes “paper is one of the finest and most desirable bodies that we can ever have the pleasure of touching” and is a much more beautiful way to go than via the vastness of the cyber highway.
Poetry is Haddad’s first passion. Through her poems, books and her latest publication she presents another version of the Arab woman to counter the traditional model present in the Western mind. Saddened and angered at the perception of a traditional veiled and subservient woman, Haddad says that the Arab woman deserves to be seen. Of course, Haddad is not passive. The poems in her book “The Return of Lilith” imagines the mythological Lilith in all her creative and destructive fury. “I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman” is her latest book which is available in English, French and German. Haddad’s books include “Invitation to a Secret Feast” published in both Arabic and English. She is fluent in Arabic, English, French, Italian and Spanish.
Growing up with the civil war which began in Lebanon since she was four years old until the age of 21, violence has shaped Haddad‘s life. Despite experiencing and seeing horrible things, “they did make me the person I am today.” She added: “For me, writing is a very physical process. I always say that I write with my fingernails, on my own skin, on my body. I want to scratch away the surface.” Even though eroticism is closely related to death, Haddad says it “is the pulse of life and is what most gives me the feeling of being alive.”
Sabah Fakhoury
Arab Detroit