Menopausal Tremors: Refurbishing the Body

The third chapter centers on novels by Rene Al-Hayek, Sahar Khalifah, Lina Kreiydiyyeh and Hayfa Bitar. It deals with urban women whose education, professional lives, and modern life-styles gives them agency allowing them personal autonomy and spatial movement. Nevertheless, the anachronistic pull of social and religious discourses that view the female body as anchored in visuality, degenders and desexualizes them, and puts them face to face with the stigma of menopause, a byproduct of modernity. In line with a creeping global consumer culture, these women deal with their degradation through body maintenance and cosmetic products to restore an eroticized youthful body. The effect of sexageism is destabilizing, turning the ageing process into a frightening process of othering and invalidation.

Introduction

Through close readings of 16 novels by male and female Arab writers, the study traces the gradual move from an ahistorical homogeneous traditional ideology of ageing into an incongruous, diverse and fluid representation. It centres on ageing as a biological phenomenon viewed in essentialist terms. The cultural view perceives the ageing process as an unstable entity that intersects with sex, gender and changing political and social configurations. The novels range from tropes of elderly men and women within paternalistic structures to more open-ended models generated by social and demographic factors. The study concentrates on the inextricable link between the biological and constructionist models, creating an alternative configuration that fuses the biological with the discursive, making the ageing process multiple and plural.

Hoary Monuments, Residual Bodies: Senescence in the City

The second chapter centers on novels by Naguib Mafouz, Alaa al-Aswany and Khalid Khalifa. The focus is on Cairo and Aleppo whose features are disappearing as a result of modernization, an anarchic urbanization, and demographic, political and social changes.In a new world, an elderly appearance in the street becomes synonymous with mockery, invisibility and erasure. The city is invaded by the new, and the old terrain of youth is gradually disappearing with the timeworn edifices peering through the cracks of modernity. The mutations taking place in the urban abode are synchronized with the alterations taking place within the physique of ageing individuals. The past remains predominant and is poignantly juxtaposed with the present, and the result is alienation and escape through memory.

Yarns of Later Life: Transgressive Strategies

This chapter presents works by Nazek Yared, Randa Khalidy and Abbas Baydun that, rather than focusing exclusively on public achievement, they present semi-autobiographical accounts. They are related by older individuals who focus on their personal idiosyncratic experiences of senescence, and aspects of their lives that have hitherto been overlooked. Their aim is to challenge erasure, re-evaluate their lives, make new decisions, concentrate on their daily quotidian lives and reveal their capacity for growth, even at a late age. Despite the inevitable movement towards a future in close proximity with death, the works are concerned with a revaluation of the past in its interaction with the present.

Conclusion

Owing to the silence regarding ageing in the region, the study paves the way for further research on the subject especially that it involves a rapidly growing number of people. The book has included an array of novels that represent ageing in the process of transformation and change, fluctuating between active and passive, urban and rural, modern and traditional. Changing historical, demographic, and socio-economic factors are producing varied constructions of agedness that challenge a single paradigm.Given the wars and the wide-ranging political and social problems in the region, one expects the ageing process in the Arab world to take different directions from in the West as local and regional challenges necessitate different strategies and different forms of survival.

Senile Masculinity: The Male Body in Crisis

The novels in this chapter concentrate on works by al-Habib al-Salimi, Hassan Daoud and Rashid al-Daif that represent a diverse group of men who subvert stereotypes of manhood and view older men within a gendered perspective. It exposes images of men who are no longer certain of their autonomy and sexual performance. Unlike traditional female characters who generally avoid allusions to sexuality, men’s works are fraught with libido and complaints about sexual potency, cognitive decline, and physical impairment. In a world of shifting values, they come to the realization that they are gradually becoming more feminized, and more vulnerable to the youthful gaze of younger men and women.

Ageing in Traditional Neighbourhoods: Conformity and Transgression

This chapter reads ageing within traditional families and local communities. It examines novels by Fuad al-Takarli, Alia Mamdouh and Inaam Kachachi. These works present the ageing process as shaped by paternalistic and hierarchical structures where family support is high. The emphasis is on social and religious values, where the male patriarch retains his social and economic position and his power as head of the household. The women are sedentary creatures who place no priority on sex or physical appearance and remain generally passive and marginal. The body is disregarded in favor of the cultivation of the spirit where personal needs are virtually nonexistent. For these women, agency is achieved in nurturing and service to the family and community. While the degree of freedom the women possess varies, they attain agency within the narrow precincts of family and environment.