Poetry &Prose: Female Poets in Classical Arabic Literature

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Join us as we welcome Dr. Wessam Elmeligi, Director of the Comparative Literature Certificate and Director of the Arabic Translation Certificate at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, to discuss the significance of female poets in classical Arabic literature, dating from the 6th century to the 14th century.

Dr. Elmeligi’s discussion will focus on the misconceptions of female poets within Arab culture, in comparison to female poets of other cultures during the 6th to 14th centuries. The presentation will highlight how previous translations of Arabic poetry by women were often in agreement with orientalist misrepresentations of Arabic culture. These previous translations thus solidified the stereotyping and othering of Arab women at the time. To conclude the presentation, Dr. Elmeligi will introduce selected poems with a brief background for contextualization, followed by a reading of these poems in the original Arabic and translated English. Information included in the presentation will largely draw from the speaker’s book entitled The Poetry of Arab Women from the Pre-Islamic Age to Andalusia (Routledge, 2019).

Dr. Wessam Elmeligi is Director of the Comparative Literature Certificate, and Director of the Arabic Translation Certificate at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His first book, The Poetry of Arab Women from the Pre-Islamic Age to Andalusia (2019), collects, translates, and studies over 400 poems by 200 Classical and Medieval Arab female poets, many of which have never been studied in English before. His second book, Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration: A Poetics of Return (2020) studied migration and identity in Arabic novels, spanning as early as the 12^th century Hayy ibn Yaqzan to Manal Al-Tahawy’s 2010 Brooklyn Heights, including seminal works and novels from Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, and Yemen. Previously, Dr. Elmeligi published articles on narratology, science fiction, mythology, cinema, and writers such as Naguib Mahfouz, Sonalla Ibrahim, and Radwa Ashour. Dr. Elmeligi holds a Ph.D in literary theory; he is also a graphic novelist and artist.