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What happens when ten women gather in one place, not bound by blood ties or friendship, but only by their shared womanhood, their need for conversation, and the release of suffering in the form of sound vibrations emanating directly from the heart?

Women are inclined towards storytelling and love for tales. They pay special attention to details, such as color, sound, and light. All these elements hold significant places in their stories and cannot pass unnoticed in their everyday conversations and daily narratives.

None of them neglects a single detail, for every element is important to reach the essence of their story and to accurately and sincerely convey what is going on in their minds. It is no wonder that Scheherazade (the icon of storytelling) was a woman. The roles cannot be reversed, and Shahryar cannot be the storyteller in the legend, not because Shahryar lacks the nature or ability to create such a multitude of stories and weave this imagination, but because he would conclude his story in one or two nights, or at best, ten nights. It wouldn't be the thousand nights of the fertile Arabian mythical imagination. Only Scheherazade is capable of that, and only a woman is the mistress of the narrative.

Women may always bear the stigma of being talkative, but it is their nature, the grandmother who tells her grandchildren about the past era, conveying experiences they could never live themselves due to the impossibility of turning back time. Yet, those experiences are invaluable for learning from what was. Without that delightful chattering, the link between generations would not have formed, infused with love and saturated with genuine emotions.

A thousand nights of tales in the case of Scheherazade, and a long life of elegies and structured stories in the form of poems in the case of women who have been silenced. Only a woman's heart can renew sorrow automatically. Hence, Arab societies, in particular, have been associated with melancholy and gloom rather than tenderness and delicacy of feelings.

A woman's memory is her foremost enemy, for she does not easily let go of memories. She does not prioritize happy memories over others. Perhaps the opposite is true. A woman clings to the details of her life and does not let go of them unless forced to. And if her memory betrays her due to medical reasons, she herself becomes the memory.

Diversity of Tales and Contexts

The novel "Ten Women" by Marcela Serrano is based on individual storytelling. Each woman tells her own story in a group therapy session. The doctor in this story decided to open ten windows all at once, allowing air with different scents and natures to flow from each one. Marcela Serrano created a storm of refreshing air at times, with scorching heat on faces at other times, and a heavy scent laden with poverty and destitution emanating from the humble dwellings where the air does not circulate, at other times.

Each woman came from a different cultural, economic, and social background than the others. Some came seeking help through free healthcare coverage, while others had the means to pay, making the cost of treatment and the doctor's fee the last thing they worried about.

Looking through the other windows perhaps opened new horizons for each of them. One of them might have breathed a sigh of relief after hearing her companion's story because she realized she wasn't alone in her struggles. Another might have belittled the misfortune of the woman sitting next to her because she only knew the problems of the wealthy and the mood swings of the privileged.

The age differences were also a strength in this novel. What would happen if a woman in her seventies gathered with another in her twenties, and a third in her forties, and so on? Perhaps the elderly woman would travel back in time and remember what once was, while the young woman might catch a glimpse of a future that could resemble the one the fifty or sixty-year-old woman sitting beside her is experiencing.

Imaginary Interviews from the Heart of Reality

I fear that as time passes, one of us may let go of people's love. In youth, the scattering of emotions is a part of our being young. Playing with emotions wholeheartedly, expanding them infinitely, distributing them freely without selectivity, innocently. But as the years go by, we start to harmonize more delicately, and the result is that we remain isolated on the sidelines.

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I don't know whether categorizing literature as "women's literature" is accurate or not. And I don't mean the gender of the author, but rather the gender of the reader or the mass audience that favors this type of literature or that. When do more women gravitate towards a literary work and find it highly readable? And when does the opposite occur? I don't know the answer, but posing the question is necessary in this context.

If we look at the novel "Ten Women," we find that all the stories revolve around women as the main characters, while secondary roles are assigned to men, children, or family members. In this case, we can see that a woman's connection to such a work will be significant and profound. Every woman reading this work will find herself in one or more lines, or she will find herself between the lines, not necessarily matching her own story with the one she is reading, but rather through a similarity of emotions and reactions to similar situations in real life.

The author has chosen a writing style that perfectly suits what she wanted to address. She wrote a novel in the form of a collection of stories, or a collection of stories within a fictional framework, which kept the reader engaged until the end without boredom. This confirms that literature does not have a singular rule. Good writing takes the lead, regardless of the form it takes.

Diversity was the foundation. For example, there is "Louisa," who experienced loss when her husband was taken away at dawn during the war, and he was gone, carried away like a lamb, and she didn't know what happened to him afterwards. She tasted the pain of loss that lingers on the edge of mortal agony, because it is accompanied by an uncertain waiting that no one knows when it will end. Louisa says that the pain of death is lighter than the pain of disappearance.

It was a life lesson she learned on her own, without anyone teaching it to her or reading about it in a book. Death is a swift and decisive sword that cuts without hesitation, it seizes and doesn't look back. But disappearance is an unsheathed knife, it cuts slowly and creates a rift in the soul that, over time, becomes a deep chasm that cannot be healed.

I have always been taught to respect others, and that has been deeply ingrained in me to the extent that I often trust acquired respect more than my own involuntary reflections. There are people who tell me that I live in the past, and I'm not talking about the century that just ended, but rather the one before it. It seems that this is an unforgivable flaw. As for me, the world is vast and overwhelming, which drives me to continue moving forward as a passerby: this place is not for the hesitant.

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As for "Ana Rosa," she had a troubled upbringing. Her mother used every means to undermine her, and her mother's words were always a weapon that eroded her self-confidence. She was taught to respect everyone and disregard herself, to the point where she trusted everything except herself and her own feelings and desires. Her situation was worse than "Francesca's," whose mother's presence in her life was merely superficial, negatively impacting her because she chose absence. Initially, her mother was only there physically, but then she disappeared completely and chose a fate where she would neither be a mother nor a wife. In utter indifference, she abandoned what she had chosen of her own accord. Francesca began her story with the sentence, "I hate my mother, or perhaps I hate myself." She couldn't dissociate herself from the fact that she was her mother's daughter. Her hatred for her mother made her hate herself. One cannot dissociate oneself from the womb that brought them into life.

Ana chose not to have children and not to be the cause of tragedy for others. Francesca, on the other hand, chose to create for herself a completely different motherhood experience from what she had lived as a daughter. She chose to be the mother she had wished for herself in the past. What a challenge it was for one of them to triumph over the model she had experienced and to vomit out, all at once, the pain she had endured. To erase an engraving etched on the walls of her soul and deeply rooted in her conscious and subconscious mind alike.

Years and years passed, and I remained silent, with silence forming a knot inside me, like a tangled bundle of threads that seemed impossible to untangle. Everything became gloomy. One of us tends to ignore painful matters, and that is a mistake, a form of not learning. Even if it is challenging, it is necessary to pause and confront those issues, to capture them as if they were wild rabbits in the countryside, setting traps to catch them and prevent their escape.