Rabat – The Hassan II Foundation for Moroccans Living Abroad hosted an event on Thursday to present “Je Me Regarderai Dans Les Yeux,” the first-ever published novel by Moroccan author and journalist Rim Battal. The event was moderated by Moroccan writer and literary critic Mounir Sarhani.
Alongside journalism, Battal is a poet. Her work is renowned for its bold style and literary themes, and explores topics related to intimacy, sexuality, and resistance. She engages these themes with a challenging tone to address societal taboos and patriarchal structures.
Battal is known as an influential figure in a growing movement of Arab female writers, voicing the ongoing struggles of women in the Arab world and beyond.
In her first novel, Battal shares a story of a young 17-year-old girl forced to provide a certificate of virginity. “The body of a woman was and still is a battlefield” and a “transmission of shame,” she said at Thursday’s event.
Female intimacy is profoundly political
The novel is partly inspired by personal experience, exploring social and familial pressures facing women as they navigate their intimate lives. Mounir Sarhani, the moderator of the book launch, described the novel stating as “raw with a little of comedy.” Battal’s novel is important for the greater feminine resistance, he argued.
In an interview with Morocco World News (MWN) on the sidelines of the event, Battal said that her work is an attempt to “show how patriarchal societies sometimes succeed in controlling and surveilling the bodies of young women.”
She cited the virginity certificate as a telling illustration of how that domineering male gaze makes sure to regulate women’s bodies and choices. People’s involvement in such personal matters can result in trauma,violence, and a sense of shame in embracing their sexual life, she elaborated.
Although most people associate patriarchy with men, Battal clarified the participation of some women in deepening its dominance and thus further complicating women’s struggle for genuine liberation. Still, she continued, “there is no villain in the story, it’s just that everyone was born with different ideologies surrounding them,which they are obliged to follow.”
Both in the book and throughout discussions at Thursday’s event, Battal sought to engage with the lack of a genuinely personal, private, and intimate space for the unencumbered expression of womanhood or girlhood in Morocco and other Arab countries. In so doing, Battal exposes the limiting projections of patriarchal norms and expectations on the female body.
“Today, it is really important to look inside our houses and girls’ rooms to understand where violence starts, where oppression starts so that we can overcome such incidents,” Battal told MWN, concluding that “intimacy is political” for the female body.
