El Saadawi Does Not Orientalize the Other in \u3cem\u3eWoman at Point Zero\u3c/em\u3e

El Saadawi’s work in translation has been widely read in the West. On the one hand, she has been criticized for writing for the West, and many Arab critics argue that El Saadawi is famous in the West not because she “champions women’s rights, but because she tells western readers what they want to hear” (Amireh, 1996). In addition, when Woman at Point Zero is taught in the Western classroom, some students, reviewers, and critics tend at times to read the novel as a window “onto a timeless Islam instead of as [a] literary [work] governed by certain conventions and produced within specific historical contexts” (Amireh, 2000). Recently, Drosihn (2014) has claimed that in Woman at Point Zero El Saadawi “is implicated in Western discourses seen in her reproduction of Orientalist stereotyping feeding into Western tendencies of simultaneously superiority and fear of the Middle East and especially Islam.” Referring to Said’s theory of Orientalism, I contend that El Saadawi does not orientalize the Other in her novel Woman at Point Zero. She occupies a space in-between in which she at times employs stereotypes but at other times challenges them. Also, using the theory of intersectionality, I argue that Arab women suffer from multiple jeopardy

Our Fluttering Stranger

Currently, Lebanon is undergoing dire economic and political crises, in addition to, the August 4, 2020, Port explosion, and the worldwide Corona Virus pandemic. The country is badly in debt and a third of its population is suffering from extreme poverty. More specifically, in the past year, the country has been suffering from a shortage of fuel. To express her anger at the high rate of pollution, the narrator wrote a poem describing how the Lebanese have been living in the dark because the government can no longer supply electricity. All citizens are obliged to pay another bill for private generators. The narrator was inspired by Coleridge\u27s poem Frost at Midnight, in which the soot, the fluttering stranger, is romantically described coming out of the fireplace; for Coleridge soot is a symbol of domestic tranquility, companionship, and deep thought. The narrator creates her version of Lebanese soot in Our Fluttering Stranger

Who are you?

On August 4, 2020, Lebanon witnessed a second Hiroshima-like explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate. It killed and injured thousands of people, destroying most of Beirut. Compounding Lebanon’s misery, the coronavirus has taken its toll, as in the rest of the world, with thousands of deaths. There are no more vacant hospital beds and not enough medical supplies. For the last two years, Lebanon has been experiencing economic and political instability. The country is badly in debt and the banks have gone bankrupt and confiscated people’s life savings. The Lebanese Lira is pegged to the dollar and two years ago, every dollar was worth 1500 Lebanese Lira; recently, it reached 15000 Lebanese Lira. Half of the population is suffering from poverty and the price of basic food supplies is the highest in the MENA region. The government has resigned but the politicians cannot decide on who to form a new government. Domestic violence has been on the rise because of patriarchy but spouses are mainly fighting over insufficient salaries. Many Lebanese are immigrating, in search of a better living. The poet is dismayed at all this suffering and she resorted to sublimating her anger into writing fiction, memoirs and poetry, playing the piano, singing and drawing. She attended a drawing lesson online. The teacher showed the students how to draw a certain image of a woman. However, the woman who the poet actually drew turned out totally different. When she showed it to her friends, everybody was wondering who it was. So, she was inspired to write a poem answering their questions

The Chronotope of the House and Feminist Matrilinealism in Nada Awar Jarrar’s Somewhere, Home

This paper studies feminist matrilinealism in Nada Awar Jarrar’s novel Somewhere Home. In this novel the author builds her stories around a house which was inhabited by several generations of female ancestors. Tess Cosslett claims that the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope in matrilineal narratives influences the space and time structures of women’s writing whereby women communicate along two time frames simultaneously: a synchronic, horizontal plane and a diachronic, vertical axis. The synchronic plane refers to the way in which women from different generations unite and bond whereas the diachronic plane goes backward and forward in time. Employing Bakhtinian notion of the chronotope and Tess Cosslett’s two time frames model of feminist matrilineage, this study argues that the chronotope of the house in Somewhere, Home plays a major role in displaying matrilineage and this house clearly manifests the synchronic and diachronic planes: those of female bonding, feminist recovery, and feminist progress

Writing the Body as subversion in Alexandra Chreiteh’s Always Coca-Cola

Women in Always Coca-Cola are oppressed by multiple intersectional forces of oppression, such as patriarchy, the male gaze, colonialism, and the beauty myth. Although some women in the novella are caught in a state in between rebellion and conformism, Always Coca-Cola largely subverts patriarchy. By the end of the novella, the female protagonist is able to break free from some of her chains of oppression. Through a close textual analysis, this paper draws on many theories such as the “male gaze,” Hélène Cixous’s “writing the body,” and Naomi Wolf’s “the beauty myth” to argue that Alexandra Chreiteh’s Always Coca-Cola attempts to subvert the male and colonial gaze, the beauty myth, and heteronormativity through writing the body

Exile, Return and Nationalism in A Goodland

This paper studies the notions of exile, nostalgia, return and nationalism in Nada Awar Jarrar’s novel A Goodland. The protagonist is undergoing a quest for both her personal and national identity. My analysis benefits from various theoretical insights. I refer to Ali Behdan’s concept of minor transnationalism. Behdad declares that “discourse of displacement is split into two schools: writers who ‘have valorized, if not romanticized, the seductive power of geographical displacement’ ” (Lionnet & Shu-mei 225) and others who “focus on the actual experiences of displacement, experiences that often entail a horrendous sense of homelessness, political and economic disenfranchisement, and even physical and psychological abuse” (226). This paper contends that Jarrar in her novel combines both: the valorized and the naturalist representations. Also, I resort to post-colonial theorists, such as Edward Said, Benedict Anderson and Salman Rushdie, and critics who deal with exile and nostalgia mainly, Boym and Spitzer. Last of all, I draw on Cooke’s concept of humanist nationalism and “Beirut Decentrists”. Jarrar, like the Beirut Decentrists, promotes collective consciousness, national identity, and nonviolence

The Madness of Women as an Illusional Power in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt

Historically speaking, women have been associated with madness, be it Medea from Ancient Greece, the medieval trials of the witches of Salem, or so called “hysterical” women in the Victorian era. Even in 21st-century literature, arts, and media, the madness of women is widely discussed and often romanticized. Some women authors employed the madwoman trope to show the effects of patriarchal oppression on women. Other studies have associated women’s madness in literature with subversion. This paper, however, claims that the portrayal of madness in both Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt (1996) is not subversive, but rather symbolizes the victimization of women by patriarchy and colonialism. The paper draws on Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s approach to feminist criticism, which argues that madness is not a form of liberation and that a madwoman “cannot speak,” alluding to Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. This study compared two novels written by women from different backgrounds and centuries: one is a British imperial text, while the other is an Arab postcolonial text. Both include the trope of madness in varying contexts. The women characters in the two novels—Bertha, Maha, and Um Saad—are doubly oppressed by colonialism and patriarchy. To silence them and prevent them from rebelling, the men in their lives accuse them of being insane and lock them up in an attic or asylum. Madness is presented in both novels in terms of Western Orientalist and patriarchal stereotypes. It is associated with otherness, witchcraft, a female malady, social control, denied subjectivity, illusional power, uncontrolled sexuality, and final surrender