Topographies and Textual Negotiations: Arab Women’s Short Fiction

Abstract

In the postcolonial world of diaspora and transnational cultural flow, attempts to map the world as a group of cultural regions or homelands are confronted by a blurring of familiar lines between the ‘here’ and ‘there’, the centre and periphery, the colony and metropole, the private and public (Gupta and Ferguson 10). This blurring leads to a sense of displacement, ambivalence and ambiguity, or what Homi Bhabha describes as ‘the uncanny of cultural difference’ (72). In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon points out how the displacement of the colonized leads to an uprooting from their past, culture, traditions and history. Arab women’s short fiction can be read in this context as an attempt to address the problematics of displacement and marginalization through their use of the fantastic, the mythic and at times the folktale (hadouta). These strategies grant them the means of reclaiming their oral traditions, as well as a means of freedom of speech under autocratic political regimes and an oppressive patriarchal society.

There are dimensions here, times and places, glacial or torrid zones never moderated, the entire exotic geography which characterizes a mode of thought as well as style of life. (Deleuze 128)