The Journey Narrative: The Trope of Women\u27s Mobility and Travel in Contemporary Arab Women\u27s Literary Narratives

This study examines the trope of women\u27s journey and the various kinds of movement and travel it includes employed and represented by three contemporary Arab women literary writers, Ghada Samman, Ahdaf Soueif, and Leila Aboulela in their literary narratives as well as travelogue in the case of Samman. The primary texts analyzed in this study are Samman\u27s Beirut 75 and The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase, Soueif\u27s In the Eye of the Sun, and Aboulela\u27s The Translator and Minaret. These texts demonstrate how the journey trope becomes a fresh narrative strategy used by Arab women writers that allows the representation of the instability, unpredictability, and heterogeneity of Arab women\u27s identities. The multiple subjectivities the female persona/protagonists occupy become possible due to their mobility and movement, crossing the borders of time and space and occupying a fluid place of their own theoretical and imaginative construction. In these texts, travel creates a geographic in-between space for these women that allows them to contest essentialized views of their identities and narrate their own individual, hybrid, cross-cultural, and transnational identities that continually undergo transformation and change. I argue that the mobility, travel experiences, journeys, and physical displacement the persona/protagonists go through serve as tropes of female agency: movement allows them to map personal geographies and exist in a liminal space of their own construction, where they counter fixed Western Orientalist, Neo-Orientalist, and traditional patriarchal discourses that presented them at different historical moments as speechless, subaltern, and stripped of their agency. As a result, the journey trope serves both as a way to examining the varied representations of Arab woman subjectivities in addition to destabilizing fixed notions of gendered, cultural, and religious identity formations

Cesaire\u27s Tempest Writes Back to the Empire

Aimé Césaire, who lived the experience of colonialism, wrote back to Shakespeare’s play The Tempest in a play of his own, which he called A Tempest. Unlike notions of A Tempest as a simplistic writing back, the current research reveals A Tempest as a sophisticated play in which Césaire uses his own creative methods, some of which incorporate the colonizer and others the colonized, to write back to the Empire which Shakespeare represents well and reflects. This research performs a deep analysis of A Tempest, revealing the voice of the Other as enabled; arguing with and disabling The Tempest’s deep bias in relation to the issue of colonialism, and therefore broadening the umbrella of postcolonial thought and discourse, which is welcoming to original methods of writing back. The research reveals Césaire’s practice of transformative methods of writing back, some of which focus on the colonizer and some of which focus on the colonized. The writing back method is achieved by analyzing A Tempest closely— revealing not only the involvement of the colonizer but surprisingly the colonized in the colonizing agenda. In addition to that, new motives of the colonizer’s practices are exposed. On another level, revealing the narrative through the colonized, about what happened and between whom, is the primary method by which the colonized gains back his legitimate power and ownership