Bint Majzoub and Hosna Bint Mahmoud: Duality or Unity?

In our class discussions, we came across the notion of doubles – exploring how Mustafa Sa’eed and the narrator act as doubles. While I found rampant duality throughout the novel, the case of the two women – Bint Majzoub and Hosna Bint Mahmoud – presents a complicated duality, one which does not offer itself up as a self-opposition or I-Thou dichotomy. My contention is that while both characters represent the case of women in a post-colonial setting, Hosna is described as being different when she was a child but became meek as a wife whereas Bint Majzoub is portrayed as a ‘liberal’ woman who speaks her mind and is “uninhibited in her conversation” even in front of men. Hosna, therefore, achieves the liberation Bint Majzoub feels, with her final act of violence; an incident which is, interestingly, narrated by Bint Majzoub. The question that arises, therefore, is whether there is a similarity between the two characters in the fact that they act as exilic figures in the novel – exiled from the ‘normal’ gender stereotype of women.

Bint Majzoub’s opinions about female circumcision on page 67 offer a sort of link between the village woman’s eagerness to please her lover with her inability to enjoy sex whereas Bint Majzoub openly discusses her own pleasure derived from intercourse. Given that it is very hard for circumcised women to achieve orgasm during sex, Bint Majzoub’s famous enjoyment of sex might be faked in order for her to fit in with the male society, which is why there are constant associations of masculinity with her throughout the narrative, e.g. the narrator notices her “masculine laugh.” In the novel, then, the character of Bint Majzoub represents a woman who sets herself apart from other women by the way she is accepted into male gatherings where she openly smokes, drinks and discusses sex.

“I became aware of [Hosna’s] voice in the darkness like the blade of a knife. ‘If they force me to marry, I’ll kill him and myself’” (80). This is the first time that we see Hosna in a light that sets her apart from the common village woman, although not to the same extent as Bint Majzoub. The comparison of Hosna’s voice to the blade of a knife is not only an allusion to the murder weapon, but also evokes Mustafa’s repeated comparison of his mind to “a sharp knife” which alludes to the fact that Hosna has accepted and internalized Mustafa’s pairing of sex and violence. In her murder of Wad Rayyes, therefore, there is an echo of the murder of Jean Morris because both take place while there is an attempt at sexual intercourse. Further, the narrator’s comparison of Hosna’s voice to a blade symbolizes a comparison between his inability to speak out against the practices of the village throughout the novel whereas Hosna commits a crime never seen before in the village by taking the life of a 70 year old man. This implies that the only way for Hosna to have a voice and take control of her life is through violence. On the flip side, however, we see Bint Majzoub having a voice without the type of violence enacted by Hosna but with a violence she does to her own femininity which is killed in favor of taking part in the male society. In both cases, therefore, while we see obvious differences of character, there is ultimately an underlying violence being done by the woman, herself.