Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023

The Role of Women Writers in Shaping Comparative Literature
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis

Why Do the Women Always Have to Translate the World?
The Role of Women Writers in Shaping Comparative Literature (or whatever we’re calling it now)

Somewhere between reading Clarice Lispector and listening to a podcast about Banana Yoshimoto while doomscrolling through literary Twitter, it hit me: comparative literature is just a long-running group chat where women do all the emotional labor. It’s not a genre, not even a discipline anymore—more like an unspoken, ongoing negotiation. Women writing across cultures, carrying cultural trauma like a purse dog, stitching together nations, griefs, ideologies, and breakfast rituals with whatever ink they have left.

And what do we call it? “Comparative literature.” Which sounds like a PowerPoint at a graduate seminar hosted by a man in tortoiseshell glasses who only reads in translation because “it’s less colonial that way.”

No shade (okay, a little). But let’s talk about the women. Not because they’re “finally being recognized,” which is the most condescending sentence in the English language, but because they’ve always been shaping what we now retroactively call global literature. They’ve done it by being slippery, context-rich, devastatingly precise, and by telling stories that refuse to fit inside one country, one language, one idea of identity.

Cross-cultural as birthright, not performance

First of all, the whole premise of comparative literature is colonial as hell. The idea that texts can only be “compared” if they come from different empires assumes those texts ever thought of themselves as separate in the first place. Women writers—especially those with diasporic or bilingual experiences—have been poking holes in that logic for decades. Maybe centuries. Think of writers like Assia Djebar, who dragged the French language into her Algerian reality and made it sweat. Or Jhumpa Lahiri, who literally started writing in Italian just to lose the clingy, overfamiliar texture of English. These aren’t just acts of language play. They’re survival tactics.

Because here’s the thing: men write about nations; women write about translation. Internal, external, maternal, romantic. Not just between languages, but between selves. Between the version of you your grandmother expected and the one your girlfriend tolerates. Between home as metaphor and home as Google Maps pin.

In cross-cultural writing by women, the comparison isn’t between works, it’s between worlds. Language becomes liquid. Setting is not backdrop, it’s a threat. And identity is never one thing—it’s a series of negotiations you make every time someone asks, “Where are you really from?”

The library is on fire and she’s holding the match

It’s a wild trick to be both global and intimate. To write a novel that references civil war, land loss, and postcolonial theory—but the chapter titles are your mother’s grocery list. Women writers keep pulling it off. And not in a “strong female character” kind of way. More like: stubborn, exhausted, hyperaware of contradiction. The characters of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions don’t walk through history—they’re trapped in it, blinking. The colonial education system. The gendered roles. The impossibility of becoming anything besides a mirror for your father’s pride or your mother’s regret. And yet: they rebel. Quietly. Bitterly. Sometimes by refusing to translate at all.

Meanwhile, someone like Yoko Ogawa writes about violence so delicately you barely notice your throat closing. The Memory Police is one of those novels that feels like it’s about authoritarian erasure, yes, but also about how women writers—especially in systems that repress or trivialize them—get erased first. “Comparative” literature is full of ghost women, their names footnoted, their languages exoticized. Ogawa answers by writing with such control that you realize she’s not trying to be understood—she’s trying to outlast you.

I mean—how is that not punk?

Who gets to compare? And who gets compared?

Let’s be real: the academy still loves its categories. Canonical vs. non-canonical. Major vs. minor. European vs. non-Western. Male vs. “female voice.” And comparative literature departments still give more space to Dante and Goethe than to the women who recontextualize them with every word they write. (Yes, we see you, Hélène Cixous, the OG poetic troublemaker.)

But outside the academy, in the living, breathing corners of the internet (BookTube, BookTok, Substack essays where someone cries about Zadie Smith), women are doing the actual comparative work. Not formally. Not always consciously. But viscerally. Reading Valeria Luiselli after reading Toni Morrison and feeling that weird intertextual ache. Listening to Leïla Slimani on French radio and thinking of Elena Ferrante’s disembodied authorial persona. Tracing patterns not for thesis statements, but for self-preservation.

Because that’s the secret: comparative literature, when women do it, is mostly an act of staying alive.

It’s not intertextuality, it’s inheritance

You don’t read Arundhati Roy to “compare postcolonial voices.” You read her and realize your entire emotional vocabulary is insufficient. The world doesn’t make sense, and that’s the point. The plot breaks rules. Time folds. A child dies. A woman refuses the shape of her country. Then you go read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and suddenly you’re not comparing—you’re collapsing. You’re realizing these stories were never meant to be siloed by region. They’re about kinship, refusal, vulnerability, and power in whatever dialect makes the pain most bearable.

It’s not intertextuality. It’s inheritance. It's sweat-soaked. Unstable. Gloriously impure.

If that sounds too emotional for an “academic” take, good. Comparative literature as a field has always been guilty of pretending that global storytelling is a chessboard when it’s more like a panic attack in an airport bathroom. Women writers know this. They write with that buzzing, confused edge. That’s why their work travels even when they don’t. That’s why a queer, poor girl in Manila can read Han Kang and feel like someone just translated her nightmares.

We don’t want access, we want resonance

Let me say something unpopular: the whole project of “inclusion” misses the point. Giving women a seat at the table of world literature still implies that someone owns the table. What if they burn it down and start writing on the floor?

Nawal El Saadawi didn’t want your permission. Neither did Marguerite Duras. Neither does Jenny Erpenbeck, whose work carries the weight of German reunification like it’s a family secret. They weren’t seeking approval; they were interrogating the frame.

The women shaping comparative literature today aren’t doing so by adapting to it. They’re warping it. Subverting the expectations of form, of genre, of what a “novel” even is. Think of Olga Tokarczuk’s polyphonic weirdness, or Mieko Kawakami’s visceral, body-focused surrealism. Think of how writers like Shokoofeh Azar build entire books from oral mythologies rather than linear structure—because why should Western narrative logic always win?

They’re not making global literature palatable. They’re making it inevitable.

Trauma, translation, tenderness

Here’s what really gets me: women are expected to be the bridges, the cultural interpreters, the softeners. And yet the best women writers explode that. They give us work that is bristling. Work that says: I’m not translating this pain. You figure it out. Work that places emotional texture above readability.

You feel this most acutely in multilingual, transnational voices. Writers like Eileen Chang, whose writing is like silk soaked in vinegar. Or like Saša Stanišić, whose relationship to identity is so fragmented it becomes kaleidoscopic. Or like Edwidge Danticat, who writes Haiti into the bloodstream of American literature with no apologies and even fewer footnotes.

There’s an untranslatability in these works, and that’s the point. Comparative literature often wants closure—a neat understanding of how “this” relates to “that.” Women writers deny it. They offer trauma, then tenderness. They refuse to explain their metaphors. They ask readers to feel their way through, not decode.

Which, frankly, is the only kind of literature that survives the algorithmic age.

So what now?

Maybe it’s time to retire the term. Comparative literature. It feels too taxonomical. Too distant. Like we’re still trying to fit literature into filing cabinets based on passport stamps.

What women writers are doing isn’t comparative—it’s generative. Transformative. They’re not arranging the furniture of the global canon; they’re writing blueprints for a house that breathes. A house with no fixed language, no approved version of grief, no border control at the margins of identity.

Maybe the better question isn’t “How have women shaped comparative literature?” but “Why did we think it needed shaping at all?” It was always messy. Always hybrid. Always political. And women writers were always at the center of that mess, even when the syllabus didn’t say so.

They still are.

So go ahead. Read Sappho and Silvia Federici in the same afternoon. Cry about Season of Migration to the North while eating instant ramen and texting your ex. Annotate White Is for Witching like it’s a map to your own memory.

Don’t compare. Collapse. Combine. Spill.