Thus asserts Lebanese author Hoda Barakat (b. 1952) in a testimonial essay entitled ‘I Write against my Hand’ (1999), in which she evokes issues of gender, agency and female subjectivity in contexts of armed conflict. Arab women have had to endure the silence and remoteness imposed on them during historical and revolutionary moments by virtue of the inherent division of the battlefield and the home as gender-specific spheres. Women have been denied a space to make ‘history in the streets’ because they are socially restricted to the realm of the private and secure home. The battlefield has been historically perceived as an inherently and exclusively masculine arena in which women have no position but that of the observer, the victim and/or the weeper. Even their contribution to liberation movements and armed conflicts is generally obscured in historical records and never fully acknowledged. However, Barakat draws attention to the relationship between women’s writing and active political engagement. Claiming and emphasising her identity as a writer, she contends that through performing testimonial practices, writers can redefine their position of public engagement and activism and assert Arab women’s active role within contexts of armed warfare. As Barakat explains, it is through giving evidence against oppressive establishments, a crucial aspect of testimonial writing, that women authors resist dominant discourses of exclusion, challenge the stereotype of the silent passive Arab woman, appropriate stories of national struggles and write themselves into their nations’ history in autobiographical narratives.