An Arabian Mosaic: Short Stories by Arab Women Writers is an anthology of short stories collected and translated by Dalya Cohen-Mor. Cohen-Mor taught Arabic literature at the State University of Amsterdam and gathered these stories to help show a realistic, non-stereotypical view of women's lives in Arab society. The stories are all fairly contemporary – from various times and places in the the twentieth century Arab world.
Like all good short story collections, this collection is like a box of assorted chocolates - each story is exquisite in a different way. Some stories explore hope and joy among pathos, like "The Future" by Daisy Al-Amir which tells the story of a woman's decision to use her dwindling funds to buy a new dress in the middle of a battle torn city. Others, like Alifa Rifaat's "My Wedding Night", explore pathos amongst joy in the story of a woman who discovers on her wedding night that her husband has been maimed by a family member who objected to his marriage. The stories explore events from women's lives through out the lifespan; from childhood to child rearing, marriage to marital infidelity; school days to career; birth to death. In the process we read about sanity in an insane asylum in Sharifa Al-Shamlan's "Fragments from a Life", a woman's decision to cheat on her husband in Layla Al-Uthman's "The Picture", and how a professional mourner deals with loss in Samira Azzam's "Tears for Sale." The authors range from those familiar in the west, such as Egyptian writer Nawal Al-Saadawi, to those for whom this is their first publication in English such as Sakina Fuad, Rafiqat al-Tabia, and Hayat Ibn al-Shaykh, and Layla Bin Mami.
This is an excellent book for anyone who enjoys short stories, collections of women writers or is interested in women's lives in the Middle East. The only thing that would have improved this collection is if the stories had been marked with the year they were written or first published. This information can often be found in the author biographies at the back of the book, but I think it would help to illuminate women's lives better if the stories were dated. For instance, when I read the first two stories, Ulfa Al-Idilbi's "The Breeze of Youth" and Ihsan Kamal's "A Mistake in the Knitting", the (translated) language made me feel like I was reading something relatively current, and I thought that it seemed like the protagonists were 30 or 40 years behind the times relative to us, because the themes were very reminiscent to me of American women's stories from the 60's and early 70's. Then I looked at the author biographies and discovered that these stories were from 1963 and 1971 respectively.
An Arabian Mosaic is both enjoyable and informative. It is well worth reading. Having read it, I am looking forward to reading some of the other collections of short stories put together by Dalya Cohen-Mor.
Dalya Cohen-Mor. An Arabian Mosaic: Short Stories by Arab Women Writers. (Potamac, MD: Sheba Press, 1993.)
