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This study explores the self-nature relationship through tracing the key role that the weather conditions in Arab American Laila Lalami’s novel The Other Americans (2019) play in narrating the protagonist’s story. It highlights how the weather conditions echo Nora’s deep emotions and reflect her inner thoughts and feelings in the light of her relationships with other characters. The study focuses on Nora’s journey of becomingness and reveals that through depicting the changes in the weather, the story of Nora’s self-actualization and settlement can be narrated. It considers presenting how reading the weather conditions informs the reader about Nora’s self-perception, love affairs, career development and aspirations. It also explores how Lalami employs weather description to show the ways in which Nora ends up achieving self-reconciliation. As the events unfold, Nora is transformed from a person who comments on the clouds and winds and describes the fogs and rains to a fully-fledged character who, figuratively, is able to conjure up thunderstorms and hurricanes. Hence, by paying closer attention to the weather conditions, one can arguably witness Nora’s metamorphosis. In other words, Lalami’s novel is a site in which discourses on identity, ethnicity, multiculturalism and environment converge.

This paper compares between the voices of three old women characters in three short stories by two Arab women writers. The stories are Ahdaf Soueif’s “Her Man” and “The Wedding of Zeina” (from the same story collection Aisha) and Alifa Rifaat’s “Bahiyya’s Eyes” from her story collection Distant View of a Minaret. The paper reveals, from a feminist perspective, how the women characters are positively or negatively influenced by the way patriarchy perceives them and relates this perception to Jacque Lacan’s theory of the gaze. It also shows how each one of the old women characters seeks to pass her understanding to the upcoming generation and demonstrates how her voice turns out to be either one of patriarchy or resistance. The paper finds that although the voices of the three old women in the three short stories differ in their representation, they can be placed in the same boat as the female character who listens to the old woman’s voice does not act passively in any of them.

This study demonstrates the influence of absent/present mothers on their daughters in Jordanian-British Fadia Faqir’s novels My Name Is Salma (2007) and Willow Trees Don’t Weep (2014). It manifests the difference between the positive and negative impacts of the mothers of Salma and Najwa, the two heroines in the two novels under discussion, respectively. The study also exposes the difference between Salma and Najwa based on their fragmentation and its intricate interconnection with their mothers, the way they deal with their mothers’ belongings, and the effect of the memories of their mothers on their self-formation. As it does so, the study highlights how each one of these heroines utilizes her mother’s influence on her to achieve self-formation in her own way as she crosses borders. Through its focus on the mother-daughter bond in both novels, the study concludes that despite the mother’s physical absence, her evident presence turns out to be inescapable; the positive influence of Salma’s absent mother helps Salma recollect herself, and the negative influence of Najwa’s absent mother helps Najwa shape her new identity.