This paper offers a critical reflection on the play I Am Waiting for You [Wasafuli Al-Sabr] which was written by the author and directed by Lina Abyad. Based on extensive interviews with real-life female cancer patients from the Arab world, the play was the first dramatic staging of Arab women’s experience of cancer. To summarise, the paper begins by underlining that the history of women’s cancer in the Arab World has hitherto been a history of silence – of shame, taboo, prohibition, and repression – before going on to reflect upon the creative, textual, and dramatic strategies the play deployed to make this silence ‘speak.’ The essay then focuses on the ways in which this unspoken and unexpressed experience of cancer itself became a (necessary) artistic medium by which the subjectivity of women who had experienced cancer could be articulated. In particular, the essay addresses three layers or forms of silence in the play: (1) the silence of the women the author interviewed; (2) how silence functioned as a structural device or trope within the play and, finally and most importantly, (3) how this silence could be resisted, if not verbally, then at least physically and materially.

中文翻译：

---

分期沉默：阿拉伯妇女的癌症经历

本文对由作者撰写并由丽娜·阿比亚德 (Lina Abyad) 执导的戏剧《我在等你》[Wasafuli Al-Sabr] 进行批判性反思。该剧基于对来自阿拉伯世界的现实女性癌症患者的广泛采访，是阿拉伯女性癌症经历的首次戏剧性上演。总而言之，该论文首先强调阿拉伯世界女性癌症的历史迄今为止一直是沉默的历史——耻辱、禁忌、禁止和压制——然后继续反思创造性、文本和戏剧性的策略为了使这种沉默“说话”而部署的戏剧。然后，这篇文章将重点放在这种不言而喻的癌症经历本身成为一种（必要的）艺术媒介的方式，通过这种媒介，患癌症的女性的主观性可以被表达出来。这篇文章特别提到了剧中三个层次或形式的沉默：（1）作者采访的女性的沉默；(2) 沉默如何在戏剧中充当结构装置或比喻，最后也是最重要的是，(3) 如何抵抗这种沉默，如果不是口头上的，那么至少是身体上和物质上的。