Submissions for Banat Tariq

Arab feminists are well rooted in the Arab region and diaspora. Their discourse doesn’t stem from a void, and they are not a project of western concerns and practices. Sawtalniswa (Voice of the Women), the feminist webspace based in Beirut, is working to highlight the need for Arab women’s writings, especially writings that question and reflect on the roots of Arab feminism, and how that affects its discourse. Writing about women’s presence while their pasts aren’t fully revealed is a dubious way to move through the future or to change the present. Where do we come from as Arab women, and what happened to us exactly? When we look at our pasts, what pasts are we looking for or writing about?

Women throughout the region are picking up questions that women rights pioneers have been asking in times similar to our present time. Values of injustice, liberation and emancipation have come to the surface again, as Arab societies are witnessing changes, though these changes carry a possibility of a dim future for women’s status and risk losing many of the achievements that pioneers have already reclaimed.

Thus, Sawtalniswa is proud to introduce the Banat Tariq anthology project. Banat Tariq is a tribe of Arab women warriors who lived at the periphery of the new-found Islamic community, and it is meant to be a bridge for that repressed past and its buried knowledge. They are asking for submissions and contributions from Arab women with feminist interests in retelling the stories of our women ancestors, breaking and refuting the manipulated history we know of ourselves as women.

The anthology will be accepting 15 submissions (3000-4000 words) from Arab women and women of non-Arab ethnicity in the region and the diaspora that explore our history, whether through presenting and invoking an ancestral figure or through personal non-fiction narratives of empowerment.