There are several compelling signs that make it irresistible to read Songs for Times of Darkness by Iman Humaidan as a ‘feminist’ novel. Spanning over seven decades, with an epical ambition, this is the story of four Lebanese women of four consecutive generations of the same family. 

Iman Humaydan | Songs for Times of Darkness | Saqi Books | 256 pages | 12 USD

In a letter addressed to a friend who lives in New York, Asmahan, the youngest of them, goes back to 1908 when Shaheera, her great grandmother was married at the age of fourteen. She proceeds telling the stories of Yasmin, her short-lived grandmother, Liela, her mother who mysteriously disappears, and her own story escaping her divorcee taking her daughter with her. 
Tracing the fate of these women within the rapidly changing social and political context up to 1982, Asmahan reveals a long history of suffering under a male dominant society with its different cultural taboos and various aspects of social and political violence. Yet men in this novel are so thinly present that they look as if they were typical female characters in conventional novels. 

Unlike Nawal El-Saadawi, the pioneering Egyptian feminist writer, Humaidan doesn’t aim to blatantly challenge those who play down women’s grievances or even those who dismiss their cause altogether. Nor is Humaidan overtly campaigning for solidarity with women, but rather going back to the beginning, to the origin, the feminine origin; the aim being not producing an alternative story to the prevalent one but rather digging out the original one, revealing the concealed, the oppressed and excluded from society and cultural acknowledgment.  Writing the unwritten women’s story, Humaidan returns to the story of the feminine being mother earth who boundlessly give without expecting anything in return. Thus Shaheera does what is expected of her being the origin and the symbol of giving, creation and renewal which is what makes life’s continuity possible against the probable danger of perishing. 

Songs for Times of Darkness is the author’s fifth novel in her relatively long period of writing fiction. The idea of the feminine being the sole origin of humanity is not new in her the work. It first appeared in ‘B as in Bait as in Beirut’, her brilliant debut novel, twenty-five years ago and it gradually became stronger in subsequent novels. 

Whether in her consciousness, her action or expression, Shaheera now is the model of the feminine origin. She is the strongest among the four female characters but when she talks, expressing her awareness of her female identity, she neither uses fiery rebellious rhetoric nor feminist abstract theories. Indeed she avoids prose altogether and instead resorts to singing, the combination of poetry and music, the original language of nature. In singing Shaheera seems to be naturally responding to the music of the surrounding world, a music which couldn’t be discerned by anybody apart from those selective few who know how to listen to the voice of nature. 

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Shaheera primarily loves to sing. However singing is also her means to assert her awareness of herself, her passion and her hopes. It’s her means to subdue the sense of being isolated especially after she gets married and moves to live in a new village. She also sings whenever she needs to be strong and resist being overcome by the demands of her exceptional role. Singing is a language which she uses it to address the dark world around her, to be able to grasp it and manipulate it to the advantage of her family.
Shaheera’s responsibilities are grave from the beginning. After her sister dies it becomes her social responsibility to become both the surrogate wife of her sister’s husband and the surrogate mother of her children, thus playing the mother’s role before she has children of her own. She also plays great role in her husband’s work while simultaneously tries to provide the children with better opportunities of education and life. Unlike most people, Shaheera soon realises that for her society to survive it must change. It must give up its dated methods of managing things. 

Armed with natural wit and acumen, with historical awareness of history, she manages to steer her society towards the future. Unlike those around her who measure time according to invariable signs and duties, she sees it in its motion and successive periods revealing expected change and dictating the necessity of being able to accommodate such change. Out of her sheer practical sense that one must anticipate future’s challenges before it was too late, Shaheera could be seen as a ‘progressive’ character. However this practical nature of hers makes her unable to commonly express her emotions even when she needs to grieve the death of her own daughter. Neither ordinary speech nor the language of songs offers her the required means of mourning thus she resorts to total silence. 

According to secular wisdom, women position should considerably improve with education and intellectual and political progress. Not so according to the history unravelled through Songs for the Time of Darkness. In comparison with Shaheera’s life the successive generations of women fare less in spite of their education and being married to husbands of less domineering inclination. Shaheera alone lives well into her eighties never to have to leave her home at all. 

Shaheera gains such a high figure because, contrary to her female descendants, she refuses to be helplessly dependent on men. Thus she neither gives in to the patriarchal system nor is she compelled to run away from it. Her will, which is that of the will of the feminine origin, makes her both strong and flexible according to her need and thus independent enough so she doesn’t have to desperately on men’s help.

In the shadow of the towering figure of Shaheera, the characters of the other three women appear and disappear one after the other. Her daughter, the physically fragile and short-lived Yasmin, dies at the age of seventeen while giving birth to Laila. And just as Shaheera, had brought up her sister’s children , she brings up her granddaughter Laila. Against the overwhelming awareness of the absence of her both parents, her mother being deceased and her father working and living abroad, Liela, on the other hand, grows up as a romantic character who feeds on reading fiction to the extent of becoming wholly oblivious to the real world around her. When eventually she is forced to face reality she hopelessly falls prey to male violence, gets mad and eventually disappears leaving no trace behind her. 

Evan Asmahan, the narrator who belongs to a later and liberated generation, is compelled to leave with her daughter escaping violence in its domestic and political forms. Her divorcee tries to take away her daughter from her just as he has already taken away her son all while the Civil War is still raging on. 

The novel finishes a couple of weeks before the end of 1982 which is significantly enough the year of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It is also significant because it leaves the reader staring at a relatively long period between the date’s ending and now with unanswered questions: What’s become of Asmahan and her daughter? What was Liela’s fate? How does Asmahan get along with her friend in New York? Questions which lead one to wonder whether we should expect a sequel. Let’s hope our expectation is fulfilled. Let’s hope too that we needn’t wait another seven years to read it which was how long it took Humaidan to complete Songs in the Times of Darkness.