International Journal of Gender & Women's Studies

Women’s Political Strategies: The Power of Telling Silence in Maghrebian Folktales
Hajer Ayadi

Abstract
Resistance embraces many coping mechanisms employed for survival including silence when it is used as an aid to the survival and healing of the individual. Throughout many Folktales in Monia Hejaiej’s Behind Closed Doors: Women’s Oral Narratives in Tunis, Jilali El Koudia’s Moroccan Folktales, Zineb Ali Benali’s Kan ya makan, L’ Algerie Conteuse, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatima Mernissi, Maghrebian women use silence not as an indication of modesty and submission but as an act of defiance and strength. In the Maghrebian culture, silence is seen as a feminine virtue which signifies modesty and obedience. However, the silence of women, as presented in the folktales in the aforementioned books, extends beyond their muted voices. Women have used it as a powerful way to handle the pain of their lives. Silence has been used as a voluntary act, a freely chosen refusal to speak. Therefore, it becomes a political discourse and act through which women subvert the patriarchal norms by expressing their displeasure, their freedom to retain their own secrets. Significantly, the storytellers and the protagonists of their tales maintain silence as a loud sound that represents an appropriate, viable and useful response to patriarchy. Thus, they effectively reclaim an action previously regarded as passive, even apathetic and use it as a means of social and personal transformation.

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