The Poetry of Arab Women, edited by Nathalie Handal, came across my desk some months ago. I was impressed; it's an extremely thorough collection, featuring a wide range of Arab women poets from around the world. I thought it was an good book, and figured I'd review it sometime soon, and basically let it sit on my bookshelf for a while.

As news footage of 9/11 took over American televisions, and as a clamor of voices began immediately insisting that Arabs were responsible for the tragedy, I felt compelled to pick this book up again. What I had initially enjoyed as an addition to the literature of identity politics became something much more relevant.

I think the events of this fall cast Handal's collection in a new role. After 9/11, after watching the world approach what could turn into an Arab/American war, I want every American to read this book. Americans need to remember that there is a vast multiplicity of voices in the Arab world — that it's not only unfair but also ridiculous to paint Arabs with a single brush.

Handal's introduction does an excellent job of setting the poems in context. It is occasionally hard to plow through — there were times when I was tempted to just skip ahead to the "good stuff" — but I am glad I read the whole thing. "[T]he enthusiasm for the written word among Arabs manifests itself from ancient times until the twenty-first century," Handal notes, pointing out that contemporary Arab women's poetry manifests "a richness of voice and imagination." She outlines for the reader a history of Arab women poets from the Pre-Islamic times until the present, taking into account both historical and literary trends.

"The first concerns and preoccupations of Arab women poets were, unsurprisingly, their unjust degradation, marginaliation, and oppression by the social system, and their boundedness by tradition," she writes. She cites food and family as primary sources of identity and, hence, primary poetic themes.

She addresses the question of how to identify Arab women poets. Sometimes the classification is easy; women poets of Arabic descent who continue to live in Arab lands, for instance. Arab women poets in the diaspora, who have clearly Arabic surnames and write about being Arabs. But sometimes it's tricky:

Then there is Mona Simpson, who was born in the United States, writes in English of course, and is of Arab descent (her father is Syrian), yet is hardly ever referred to as an Arab-American writer. Is it because her work does not reflect her Arab heritge or is it because she doesn't really present herself as an Arab-American? We can use various facts to define a person's identity, but finally we do not really have that right; an individual's claim is ultimately the most essential and must be respected.

This is largely the conclusion to which I came when wrestling with the question of how to define a Jewish writer, so I see her point.