Beyond the Eurocentric Canon

‘Medieval’ Women of Color Writers

TW - Mentions of: Islamophobia, military occupation, the brutal realities of enslavement, genocide, the MMIW crisis, and outdated language use via reference in regards to the Original Nations

This piece heavily discusses the devastating and far reaching impacts of white supremacy, please protect your peace where needed. 💜

A voiceover without background music is available below introductory text.

I wonder if they felt like Gods?

If the pen scratched the surface of the map in that unpleasant sort of way as they meticulously shaded, simultaneously sealing the fates of millions for generations to come? Did their hands shake under the enormity of it all, or was this yet another menial task in a long list of menial tasks?

Hollywood has me convinced the room was sepia toned—I know this is untrue, but it is a hard image to shake, as most deeply ingrained biases are. I’m certain the room held in the stale, sharp air as the body odor and cigarette smoke mingled in a space barely large enough to fit the egos within. An intern, vying to be accepted, surely scoured the office space for pens of various colors. Colors that came to represent people, man-made borders, and the ultimate masters. Colors that dictated the lives of peoples purposefully excluded from the thick-aired room where the decisions were made and men cosplayed as gods on a government salary.

Was there a roar of congratulations on a job well done? Sweat dripping. Matches flickering. Hands clutching.

Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement of March 1916, Iraq and the Levant were divided up between France and Britain, with the backing of Czarist Russia, to determine their respective areas of control and influence. A map of the region sprawled the length of the table as government interns marked the masters with colored pens. “To France went “the blue area” (coastal Syria, currently Lebanon, and part of northern Syria and southern Turkey) and Area A, the white area surrounded by a blue belt (currently Syria and part of northeast Iraq). Britain got “the brown area” (Palestine), “the red area” (the greater part of Iraq), and Area B, a white area surrounded by a red belt (stretching from al-‘Aqaba in the east to Kirkuk in the northwest, and to Basra in the west and south, passing through Amman).”¹ Countries divvied up, determined to be unfit for national sovereignty by men likely unable to speak the local dialect.

The forced, brutal, militarized occupations that followed—and continue on today—displaced millions of people, extinguishing the light of countless souls lost to history in a registry far too long to properly witness. In the context of this occupation, and the much broader implications of white supremacy, any reaction to the enforced Eurocentric patriarchal rule was—and still is—deemed more barbarous by virtue of Brown skin.²

Unmitigated war ravages a country’s landscape, but it also ravages a country’s creative soul. What is lost to us should shake us to the core, as forced survival does not yield the luxury of creative pursuits or academic endeavors. Destroyed universities. Leveled archives. A land’s history robbed by its roots compounded by the destruction of its future occupants. This forced displacement catalyzed a new way of identifying authorship: ‘Writers of Occupied Palestine.’³ A designation utilized to not only rebel against the newly acquired annexed appellation but to witness the confrontation of colonial reality.

“…would be willing to offer the Arabs their independence.”

A Culture of Domination

“The power of the word is the greatest known to society.”⁴ Words allow us to form a connection to the world and people around us, they allow us to express the immense complexities of the human experience and to have those complexities expressed back to us to form communion. They have the power to build, to break, to bristle. They have the power to shape the narrative of any one person or persons and to be the “definitive story of that person”⁵. Tell the story of Palestinians resisting without telling the story of the aftermath of the Sykes-Picot agreement more than a century ago, and you have a very different story. Cherry-picked history in service to white supremacy allows a culture of domination to be minimized into moralistic endeavors, repackaged as efforts ‘for the greater good,’ but is one human having dominion over another ever good?

Global colonization of the western powers has ensured that a very specific voice has had access to be the definitive voice, shaping for centuries the supposed naturality of patriarchal rule and male violence. As Steven Newcomb poignantly states within An Original Nations’ Examination of “Freedom,” “Human” and “Human Rights”⁶, the global north has conflated human existence with “unrestrained domination.”⁷ Conquest, colonize, crusade. Words of domination shrouded by the illusion of progress and positioned as a necessity to obtain said progress, but to assume progress alongside the progression of time is as much of a patriarchal fallacy as the patriarchy itself. As Donna Haraway noted “history is a story Western culture buffs tell each other.”

Women of the Haudenosaunee via PBS

The [painful] irony of being a modern American woman is that many of us sit upon lands that witnessed greater gender parity for the thousand years prior to colonization than what is experienced present day in the freest country in the world. Women of the Haudenosaunee “had absolute control of their own bodies and chose if, when, and how they would birth.”⁸ The very participatory democracy the ‘founding father’s’ modeled American democracy upon is one in which women were not just equal partners within, but were the ultimate leaders of⁹, yet when the words “all men were created equal” became etched onto the page, they very clearly did not mean all humans. Just the men. And more specifically, just the white men. This is the intentionality of white supremacist patriarchal histories: it conflates man’s will to be humankind’s while upholding the supposed inherentness of women’s secondary status through the prioritization of the androcentric experience.

Beyond the Eurocentric Canon

The ethnocentricity inherent of histories created to uphold the norms of the global north teach us that women advocating for women is something new. Something audacious that the white women of Seneca Falls, NY were demanding of the world in the mid-19th century. Yet, centuries prior the enslaved across the Americas looked upon the various fights for freedom from oppression, experiencing first-hand the most egregious form of hypocrisy. Arguably they themselves would author—uncredited when discussing declarations of independence, of course—“the earliest declarations of freedom, and they were written in blood in the form of slave insurrections.”¹⁰ Eurocentric histories upholding the tenants of patriarchal Christianity likewise minimize the Creation Myth of the Original Nations, “where the respect accorded to women has been reflected historically in the position of women within tribal societies.”¹¹ The white women of Seneca Falls may have been audacious in their insistence of equality within the frameworks of patriarchy-influenced—and recorded!—western-centric histories, but they were hardly the first audacious, patriarchy-confronting women those lands had witnessed.

Those championing for gender equality in the 19th century were educated within a system steeped in the belief that “Native Americans, like Indigenous people everywhere, belonged to the past and that they were lower down the chain of development, closer to primordial state. If humanity was advancing from savagery to civilization, then Western Europe was at the peak of this ladder of progress. Everyone else was on the lower rungs.”¹² These beliefs were not only reinforced by, but predicated upon centuries of language issued via the Vatican in the spirit of domination.¹³ “O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ!”¹⁴ This language of domination was saved exclusively for non-white, non-Christian humans, which meant that when white men wrote the history of white men, only stories in service to Christianized patriarchy made the cut. Perhaps if the voice of Afira bint Abbad (Yamama, modern day Bahrain)¹⁵—who took to the streets to shout stanzas of freedom opposing patriarchal harm in the 3rd century CE—had been included in the writing women had access to, the long tradition of suffering patriarchal trauma well-nigh ‘unopposed’ would have been severed sooner.

post created by @Aya_Sabi on X

Lest we forget that patriarchal histories not only wish to exhort the tales of great men, but support the continued othering of women through the naturalization of oppressive Eurocentric (read: antiquarian and medieval Christian) gender norms.

If an anthology of literature of the Middle Ages does include the voices of women, generally only those of a western European background are featured. Which too often begets the supposition that only white women were writing, or writing of importance or influence. As necessary as books such as Medieval Women in their Communities, Women of the Middle Ages, and Studying Medieval Women are in terms of placing the non-privileged women back into the pages of medieval history, ultimately they are framing European women as the only women: the standard woman. These anthologies also exclude the voices of the women storytellers from preliterate societies, which historically—and ironically—often had far greater access to utilize their voices within their communities than their western European counterparts found within the pages.¹⁶ Much too can be said on the framing of preliterate societies as unintelligent or inhumane within the Anglo-centric annals; this of course only furthering the ‘naturality’ and ‘inevitability’ of patriarchal rule.

The assumption (bias) that patriarchy is natural is entirely at odds with the resources required—and harm inflicted—to uphold it. We are witnessing in real-time the complete negation of the fundamental rights of women and girls under taliban leadership in Afghanistan.¹⁷ Force as fundamental to the execution of patriarchy. If we were to only view these events through the eyes of the victors—remember Churchill’s quote on writing history?¹⁸—we would hold the belief that girls and women are seductive creatures intent on the downfall of men, not able to possess the intellect to participate within their own lives beyond a helpmeet. But, while taliban leaders give smug interviews over their own male-genius, the girls and women of Afghanistan, within the most oppressive of environments, challenge that bias and exemplify the deep resiliency and long standing tradition of women in the world fighting against the patriarchal single story.¹⁹

Hadith Bayad wa Riyad (13c)

Women are not a monolith. Women of color are not a monolith. Women of a certain race, religion, or orientation are not a monolith. What this piece hopes to accomplish is to create an introduction to, or expand upon possessed knowledge of, non-Eurocentric women’s voices and the power those voices held within the frameworks of their own communities, their own histories, their own lands. Their exclusion within the canon should not be mistaken for anything other than the devious designs of white supremacist patriarchy in support of the single story. And while utilizing the word ‘medieval’ to categorize women’s words outside of western Europe only further Eurocentralizes the topic, categorizing work from preliterate societies as ‘prehistory’²⁰ demeans the expansiveness and importance of a land’s story told verbally.

The insidious roots of colonization run deep in this world and the grim reality is that far too many voices have been suppressed under white supremacist capitalistic patriarchy. And let me be clear, this is true for both women and men. To honor the hardships and humanity disregard in modern times by these medieval²¹ practices, the below writers originate from continents that are currently seeing human erasure in support of white supremacist capitalistic patriarchy: Women of ‘Medieval’ Africa, where genocide has been ongoing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996, with “6 million conflict-related deaths in the DRC since 1998.”²² The Prolific Classical Poems of Arabic Women, where genocide and mass displacement has been ongoing in Palestine, with 40,000 souls extinguished since last October²³ and millions²⁴ displaced since 1948. And The Women Storytellers of Turtle Island, as murder is the “third-leading cause of death among American Indian/Alaskan Native women” within the context of the ongoing MMIW crisis²⁵.

Voiceover without music here:

Women of ‘Medieval’ Africa

Queen of Sheba within Bellifortis (c.1405)

Information gathered from https://books.openedition.org/pressesinalco/29920?lang=en and https://muse.jhu.edu/article/26528

“Medieval Arabic inscriptions are one of the most valuable sources for the history of the eastern part of West Africa’s Sahel region. They provide data on the region’s polities, urban centres, and intellectual and commercial contacts with the world across the Sahara.”²⁶ These inscriptions, which date between the 11C and 15C CE also preserve contemporary cultural context that is too often disregarded when manuscripts are copied from an oral tradition to a literate one, often in a more patriarchal setting, “composed from a distance by foreign authors.”²⁷

“Some of the royal inscriptions from Saney commemorate women and give them the title of “queen”. However, the analysis of the rhetoric of those inscriptions suggests that those women were not wives of kings, nor political rulers in the strict sense. Rather, each of them held a special female ritual office that balanced the king’s political office. Those Saney Islamic inscriptions record a form of female high office, and authority, not mentioned in connection with the area either by other genres of written evidence or by oral tradition. It is only the engraved Arabic evidence that attests to this form of female power.”²⁸

Subsequently, within his book Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam, Jacob Lassner examines a similar transfer of power from earlier depictions of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon and the men around her in later Hebrew and Arabic texts. “It appears that both traditions ended up agreeing that the self-confident biblical Queen of Sheba posed a challenge to the natural, that is, male-dominated, order. Instead of focusing on the Queen's political astuteness, Judaism and Islam eventually viewed her as a subtle seductress and, hence, as (morally) inferior to Solomon.”²⁹

King Solomon and Queen of Sheba as depicted in an illuminated manuscript of Speculum Humanae Salvationis (c.1430)

Wendy Laura Belcher so too critiques “the fourteenth-century Egyptian and Ethiopian novel the Kəbrä Nägäśt” as “its African Christian portrayal of the Queen of Sheba differs radically from other versions in depicting a queen wiser, purer, and more powerful than any man, one so strong she could take the Ark of the Covenant from King Solomon.”³⁰ The insidious nature of white supremacist patriarchal histories—which minimizes women into medieval Christian gender roles—strikes again.

Walatta Petros (1592-1642)³¹

Quote from Same-Sex Intimacies in the Early African Text Gädlä Wälättä P̣eṭros (1672): Queer Reading an Ethiopian Woman Saint by Wendy Laura Belcher

“In the seventeenth century, when these events took place and this text was written, highland Ethiopia was the location of a feudal kingdom with a royal court: Abyssinia. Highland Ethiopians had already been practicing an ancient form of African Christianity since the fourth century, in the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church, with an elaborated monastic system of more than a thousand monasteries. Since the fourth century, its scriptoriums have produced a large indigenous literature in the classical African language of Gəˁəz (Ethiopic), including original texts of theology, poetry, biography, and history—a vital but criminally understudied African archive. Starting in the sixteenth century, Portuguese Jesuit missionaries came to Ethiopia to convert the Ethiopians from their ancient form of Christianity to Roman Catholicism and temporarily converted the Ethiopian King Susənyos. Many Ethiopian women fought this conversion, however, and after ten years the king rescinded his conversion edict; around ten of these women went on to be sainted in the Ethiopian church (Belcher).

Wälättä P̣eṭros was one of these women: she led a nonviolent resistance movement against the king, founded seven religious communities with many followers, and was the founding abbess of her own monastery, which still exists today. By the end of her life, she was subject to no man, being the outright head of her community and even appointing abbots, who followed her orders.”³²

The Prolific Classical Poems of Arabic Women

Within the introduction of his book Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology, Abdullah al-Udhari writes “the standard history of Classical Arab poetry begins and ends with a man, with the odd woman thrown in, who is either tearing her eyes out over the dead or tantalizing men’s desire with song and lute. Women poets appear as incidentals and the biographical dictionaries devote minimal space to them, in spite of the fact the their contribution to the growth of the literary tradition is as significant as that of the men.” Al-Udhari goes on to argue that these poems are too often omitted due to their ability to cut through the patriarchal veneer of the false projection of all-powerful, natural leaders. This collection of poetry makes it evident that medieval Arabic women far outproduced their Western European counterparts, yet anthologies capturing the work of the time too often leave their voices out and/or are lost all together.

al-Khansa’ (c.575-c.646)

Biographies from Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia (2006) and https://earlywomenwriters.com/s/early-women-writers/item/22, respectively

“Al-Khansa’ was a preeminent mukha-drama poetess (one who straddled the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods) who excelled in the genre of elegy. She composed more than a hundred short or medium-length elegies in which she elegized her brothers Sakhr and Mu’awiya and incited her tribesmen to take blood vengeance.”³³

“The collected poetry of al-Khansāʾ, the Dīwān, reflects the pagan fatalism of the tribes of pre-Islamic Arabia. The poems are generally short and imbued with a strong and traditional sense of despair at the irretrievable loss of life. The elegies of al-Khansāʾ were highly influential, especially among later elegists.”³⁴

Via the Arab American National Museum

‘Arīb al-Ma’mūnīya (c.797-c.891)

Biography from https://earlywomenwriters.com/s/early-women-writers/item/4, verse from Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology by Abdullah al-Udhari (1999)

“Arīb al-Ma’mūnīya was born in Baghdad and was thought to be the daughter of vizier Ja'far al-Barmaki. She was sold into slavery at age 10 after the downfall of her family. Al-Marakibi, who was "her master", provided her with an initial education during a stay in Basra and later became a qayna, which was a slave trained in the arts of entertainment. Arīb went on to have influential male patrons with whom she had frequent sexual liaisons. She was a singer, performer, and poet of great skill, a fine calligrapher, and displayed great knowledge of her craft. She has also been hailed as the most famous slave singer to have ever resided at the Baghdad court. She was also a polymath and skilled at court games such as backgammon and chess. She lived to the age of 96 and her career spanned the courts of five caliphs.”

Manuscript of Kitāb al-Aghānī (Book of Songs) of Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani

The main source for ‘Arīb's life is the (massive) tenth-century Kitāb al-Aghānī by Abū ’l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī:

Like her peers, he tells us, ‘Arīb was versed in poetry, composition and music performance, along with sundry other skills, backgammon, chess and calligraphy among them. Her chosen instrument was the oud, a preference she would pass on to her students, but, above all, it was her singing and composition that stood out. Citing one of his key sources, Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, Abū ’l-Faraj refers to a collection of notebooks (dafātir) and loose sheets (ṣuḥuf) containing her songs. These are said to have numbered around 1,000. As regards her singing, Abū ’l-Faraj declares that she knew no rival among her peers.³⁵

                   To you treachery is a virtue, you have many faces and ten tongues.
          I'm surprised my heart still clings to you in spite of what you put me through. 

Layla al-Akhyaliyya (d.709) pushed against strict genre adherence that women poets were forced to follow, while Wallada bint al-Mustakfi (d.1091) hosted an important literary salon in Cordoba which included the attendance of other women.³⁶ Women have always been pushing against the rigid bonds of patriarchal society.

The Women Storytellers of Turtle Island

Information gathered from The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States by Dexter Fisher (1980)

                            “It will take along time, but the story must be told.
                             There must not be any lies.”
                            -Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (b.1948)

“American Indian women have been a part of the storytelling tradition—both oral and written—from its inception, passing on stories to their children and their children’s children and using the word to advance those concepts crucial to cultural survival.”

“In the matrilineal Pueblo culture, the grandmother is the supreme storyteller. Navajos honor women in the construction of their traditional home, the hogan, which is built on four poles representing the four directions. Each pole is named after a female deity, so that the support of the home literally depends on the female.” Prior to colonization and patriarchal rule forced the Indigenous peoples of this land onto reservations, “women often held positions of importance in tribal government. Perhaps the most famous example of this importance comes from The Iroquois Great Law of Peace (1972):³⁷

The lineal decent of the people of the Five Nations shall run in the female line. Women shall be considered the progenitors of the nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and women shall follow the status of their mothers. You are what your mother is’ the ways in which you see the world and all things in it are through your mother’s eyes…The chain of culture is the chain of women linking the past with the future.”

Cochiti Women Storytellers

In precolonial, preliterate times, the Indigenous women of the Americas not only told stories through the oral tradition, but through the making of arts—potteries, dances, jewelry—which acted both as a medium of storytelling and perpetuation of important cultural beliefs. Women today honor women of the past by revitalizing these practices often lost under colonial rule, the rise of reservations, and the horrors of Christianized boarding schools—among a long, devastating list of other atrocities.³⁸

More can be learned here: https://www.nmhistoricwomen.org/time_period/pre-colonial/

Zitkala-Ša (1876-1938)³⁹

A lifelong writer and activist, Zitkala-Ša was born in 1876 on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota. In 1901 Zitkala-Ša wrote Old Indian Legends, noting in the preface:

“And now I have tried to transplant the native spirit of these tales—root and all—into the English language, since America in the last few centuries has acquired a second tongue.

The old legends of America belong quite as much to the blue-eyed little patriot as to the black-haired aborigine. And when they are grown tall like the wise grown-ups may they not lack interest in a further study of Indian folklore, a study which so strongly suggests our near kinship with the rest of humanity and points a steady finger toward the great brotherhood of mankind…”⁴⁰

And lastly, but certainty not least, I stumbled upon this beautiful tribute two days prior to publishing this piece. Thank you

Sherman Alexie

for witnessing the women storyteller(s) in your own life, your words are beautiful.

Huckleberry Whistles

1. Ashour, Radwa, Ferial Ghazoul, and Hasna Reda-Mekdashi (eds), Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873-1999

2. I’m going to cite Urban II’s speech at the Council of Clermont (1095) here, and will later cite papal bulls of the 1450s for additional evidence.

3. Ashour, Radwa, Ferial Ghazoul, and Hasna Reda-Mekdashi (eds), Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873-1999

4. Bell, Susan Groag. “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture.” Signs 7, no. 4 (1982)

5. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?subtitle=en

6. Huge thank you to

Antonia Malchik

for pointing me towards resources here. Appreciate you, you independent scholar! ❤️

7. https://originalfreenations.com/an-original-nations-examination-of-freedom-human-and-human-rights/

8. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. Ed. Dexter Fisher. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1980.

9. The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality By Angela Saini, 2023

10. To Make Our World Anew, Volume One: A History of African Americans to 1880, Ed. Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, 2000

11. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. Ed. Dexter Fisher. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1980.

12. Ibid.

13. https://archive.org/details/eurotreatiesus00daverich/page/n5/mode/2up

14. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/urban2-5vers.asp

15. Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology by Abdullah al-Udhari (1999)

16. I warn later on about my utilization of the word Medieval to describe women outside of Western Europe, but this still doesn’t dismiss the complete negation of representation in publishing

17. https://www.usip.org/tracking-talibans-Mistreatment-women

18. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”―Winston S. Churchill

19. https://spia.princeton.edu/news/womens-history-month-afghan-girls-struggle-education

20. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/prehistory_n?tab=meaning_and_use

21. Please note I am not using the word medieval here as a synonym of misogynistic or primitive, but as a statement of fact that our treatment of women today stems from the treatment of women then.

22. https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/democratic-republic-of-the-congo-country-report-march-2024

23. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

24. https://www.unfpa.org/occupied-palestinian-territory#:~:text=Around%201.9%20million%20people%20%E2%80%93%20nine,place%20can%20survival%20be%20guaranteed.

25. https://www.nativehope.org/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-mmiw

26. Kouamé, N., Meyer, Éric P., & Viguier, A. (eds.). (2020). Encyclopédie des historiographies : Afriques, Amériques, Asies (1–). Presses de l’Inalco.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid.

29. Albertini, T. (2001). [Review of the book Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam]. Philosophy East and West 51(2), 322.

30. https://wendybelcher.com/african-literature/black-queen-of-sheba/

31. This entire essay is loosey-goosey with medieval, don’t come for me with your pre-modern, please and thank you

32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.47.2.03?read-now=1#page_scan_tab_contents

33. Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia: V.I, Ed. Josef Meri (2006)

34. https://earlywomenwriters.com/s/early-women-writers/item/22

35. https://www.academia.edu/358518/The_Place_of_Competition_Arib_and_Ulayya_Sisters_in_Song

36. Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia: V.I, Ed. Josef Meri (2006)

37. secondary source here: Jacobs, Renée. “Iroquois Great Law of Peace and the United States Constitution: How the Founding Fathers Ignored the Clan Mothers.” American Indian Law Review, vol. 16, no. 2, 1991

38. https://www.aclunc.org/sites/goldchains/explore/indian-boarding-schools.html

39. Because of the impact of colonization on the survival of preliterate stories, we must rely on more modern women upholding the long tradition of conserving culture to access these important narratives.

40. American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings by Zitkala-Ša Ed. by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris (2003)

A thread on other powerful Women of Color storytellers of the past: