Water is a contextual symbol in literature. It stands for many things, depending on how it is used in a literary work. It represents, among other meanings, cleanliness, life, salvation, purification, and redemption. In Susan Muddai Darraj's A Curious Land, water plays a pivotal role in conveying themes and ideas that are pertinent to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In particular, this article explores how Darraj draws on the multivalent connotations of water to aesthetically and thematically valorize some of the dynamics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In a way, water intricately intertwines with the national Palestinian identity and it explains the causes of several Israeli assaults and aggressions on Palestinian territories and neighboring Arab countries. As the collection shows, Israeli hydropolitics and hydro-apartheid keep the Palestinians below the water poverty line in a bid to destroy their resilience and force them to emigrate. Hence, water in this collection acquires important meanings for the Palestinians, like rejuvenation, resistance, and rootedness.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which the character of the translator is depicted in the works of two Arab women writers in diaspora. Specifically, I argue that the protagonist of Arab Australian novelist Nada Awar Jarrar's Dreams of Water (2007) and that of Arab British novelist Sabiha Al Khemir's The Blue Manuscript (2008) find in their profession as translators fertile grounds for questioning their hyphenated identities. In other words, living in-between cultures and working as translators give Jarrar's Aneesa and Al Khemir's Zohra an opportunity to explore the possibilities/limitations their in-between positions open for them to contribute to founding and maintaining a common ground for cross-cultural exchange and interaction. At the same time, Aneesa and Zohra are aware of the precarious position they occupy as cultural mediators: each protagonist undergoes processes of acculturation and hybridization that ultimately stimulate her to redefine her identity, reexamine her politics of location and negotiate the incongruities of her daily experiences. Their knowledge of their home cultures and their experiences in diaspora alongside their professional position as translators mediate their understanding of seemingly unfathomable fragmented and fractured lived experiences. The two translators in the two novels realize that their identities are as malleable and mutable as the texts they work hard to faithfully render as transparent, lucid and accurate as possible.
This article adopts a literary analytical approach to illuminate the use of magical realism in the contemporary Anglophone Arab narrative of Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons (2019). The study follows a methodology which combines two critical approaches to magical realism: first, a textual approach, and then a contextual one. Accordingly, the study uses key magical realist elements in Bird Summons to delineate the poetics of magical realism within the narrative, before determining the context in which magical realism functions in the narrative. Simultaneously, the study benefits from Christopher Warnes’s two strands of magical realism, ‘faith-based magical realism’ and ‘irreverent magical realism’ in providing a coherent basis for the use of magical realism in the text. This study aims at examining the significance of the magical realist narrative in articulating Arab British identity in Bird Summons. The analysis will interpret the role of magical realism in conveying and undermining the dominant ethnic and racial discourses which shape Arab British identities in Britain. The study’s findings demonstrate how the use of magical realism in the examined Anglophone Arab novel reinforces the fictional purposes of Aboulela as a hyphenated Arab, as it allows her to undermine dominant discourses on hyphenated Arab identities. At the same time, the use of magical realism allows Aboulela to (re)construct Arab British identities within her novel, apart from essentialist views of identity.
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