Narratives of Arab Anglophone Women and the Articulation of a Major Discourse in a Minor Literature

“It is important to stress that a variety of positions with respect to feminism, nation, religion and identity are to be found in Anglophone Arab women’s writings. This being the case, it is doubtful whether, in discussing this literary production, much mileage is to be extracted from over emphasis of the notion of its being a conduit of ‘Third World subaltern women.’” (Nash 35) Building on Geoffrey Nash’s statement and reflecting on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of minor literature and Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderland(s), we will discuss in this paper how the writings of Arab Anglophone women are specific minor and borderland narratives within minor literature(s) through a tentative (re)localization of Arab women’s English literature into distinct and various categories. By referring to various bestselling English works produced by Arab British and Arab American women authors, our aim is to establish a new taxonomy that may fit the specificity of these works

Deterritorialized Anglophone Arab Women: Liminal Selves between Home and Diaspora (A Case Study of Faqir’s My Name is Salma)

Últimamente hemos asistido a un aumento sin precedentes de llamamientos a las minorías étnicas, religiosas y sexuales. Los musulmanes, los árabes y las mujeres figuran entre los más marginados de las distintas instancias del yo liminal. Por ello, dar voz a las minorías oprimidas, así como desvelar la tristeza de la inmigración—a menudo considerada como un brutal proceso de desterritorialización—se han convertido en una preocupación importante para muchas escritoras árabes anglófonas empeñadas no sólo en desvelar el estado de liminalidad de las mujeres árabes en su sociedad sino, también, en verbalizar cómo los árabes y otros inmigrantes experimentan la liminalidad de la diáspora. Este trabajo cuestiona la multiplicidad de liminalidades vividas por Salma en la novela de Fadia Faquir, My Name Is Salma (2006).An unprecedented rise of calls to voice ethnic, religious and sexual minorities has marked the last few years. Muslims, Arabs and women are considered as one of the most marginalized of all liminal selves. In this respect, giving voice to oppressed minorities and unveiling the dreariness of immigration often seen as a brutal process of deterriteriolization have become a commitment for many Arab Anglophone women writers who not only aim to reveal the state of liminality Arab women may confront in their societies, but they also verbalize how Arabs and other immigrants are liminalized in the Diaspora. The present article questions the multiplicity of a liminal state experienced by Salma in Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma (2006

Re-thinking Literary Space in Huda Barakat’s the Stone of Laughter

The Arab woman not only has contributed to the changing of the contemporary Arab literature but also has used her pen in times of wars and conflicts as a kind of resistance. Nawal Saadawi says: “does anything more than danger stimulate our creativity? And does anything threaten our creativity more than danger?” (N. Saadawi, 1996:157). In her article “Mapping Peace”, the literary critic Miriam Cooke claims that women have a stake in interpreting their war experiences. In fact, writing during war time is an experience that is part of war itself, an experience that informs the socio-political roles that precede it. The Lebanese, the Palestinian, and most recently the Iraqi women writers are vivid, genuine representatives of what a woman can create during times of war, how she can re-shape her experience of war and which portrait she can give to this experience. Hanane Sheikh, Sahar Khalifah, Mai Ghoussoub and Huda Barakat’s writings are instances of the Arab woman’s creativity in moments of conflicts, of wars and of danger. Women’s war literature allows the intolerable to be written because women do not take part in wars with arms but rather with their pens, their voices and their intellects. In fact, women writers subvert time, space and thus history to create their own world and their own records. This trend of Arab literature is viewed as an authoritative tool against the violence of war and as a passive resistance. It is also authoritative in terms of representing space and time as reshaped by wars. Contemporary Arab women writers have shown a big interest of creativity in writing novels, poems and short stories that lucidly portray the transformations war brings, and they have also shown a genuine capacity of subverting moments of war and transforming war time into moments of creation and metamorphosis. The present paper unveils Arab women writers’ genuine ability in creating a narrative space and a narrative time that is proper to moments of wars through their literary writings. Huda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter is going to be our corpus as it represents a vivid depiction of the Lebanese Civil War, and “the best novel written about the Lebanese civil war.

Negotiating Meanings of Borderlands in relation to Arabness, Americanness and Muslimness: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006)

Anglophone Arab writings have come of age after years of ethnic, religious and gender-based invisibility. This literature has carved out a niche for itself as a literature of minority, of womanhood and of borderlands. Recent theorizations on borderland zone(s) have endeavored to understand journeys of displacement and dislocation that immigrants may experience. The present paper offers an investigation of how the border zone, be it geographical or psychological, is fictionalized in Arab Anglophone women narratives. The novel of the Arab American Mohja Kahf, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), highlights the borderland zone occupied by Arabs in the diaspora and represented by Khadra, the novel’s protagonist. Kahf’s novel serves here as a case study that shows how women characters have to negotiate their Arabness, Americanness and Islamness. The question is how