Woman is “placed over there, in the category of nature, to be wrestled into submission and bent to the will of man. Her ownership of procreation, that triumph over mortality, how her cycles follow the moon, it all allows her to fit neatly into such a designation. Woman and what Fatima Mernissi calls her ‘subterranean silence’ cannot be explained or controlled. She possesses an intelligence which, like the feline variety, is often described as wily. Resilient—like a creature with nine lives, perhaps? There is a wildness to cats that persists despite their domestication, and it is the fear of this wildness which, in Samman’s story, leads Abdul to speak of his desire to ‘tame the tigress’ that is the fiercely independent Nadine.”

I wrote an essay for the fantastic Arablit Quarterly where I bang on about Ghada Samman’s short story “Decapitating the Cat,” Simone de Beauvoir, Persian proverbs, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

If you have any interest in Arab literature, beautiful illustrations, cats, insightful essays/fiction/poetry, I urge you to head over to Arablit and get a copy of the magazine.