University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 8-2012 The ourJ ney Narrative: The rT ope of Women's Mobility and Travel in Contemporary Arab Women's Literary Narratives Banan Al-Daraiseh University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Modern Literature Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Al-Daraiseh, Banan, "The ourJ ney Narrative: The rT ope of Women's Mobility and Travel in Contemporary Arab Women's Literary Narratives" (2012). Theses and Dissertations. 522. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/522 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. THE JOURNEY NARRATIVE: THE TROPE OF WOMEN‘S MOBILITY AND TRAVEL IN CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN‘S LITERARY NARRATIVES THE JOURNEY NARRATIVE: THE TROPE OF WOMEN‘S MOBILITY AND TRAVEL IN CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN‘S LITERARY NARRATIVES A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies By Banan Al-Daraiseh Mu‘tah University Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, 2003 University of Arkansas Master of Arts in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, 2007 August 2012 University of Arkansas ABSTRACT This study examines the trope of women‘s 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‘s Beirut 75 and The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase, Soueif‘s In the Eye of the Sun, and Aboulela‘s 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‘s 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. This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. Dissertation Director: ____________________________________________ Dr. Mohja Kahf Dissertation Committee: ________________________________________ Dr. Joel Gordon ________________________________________ Dr. Susan Marren DISSERTATION DUPLICATION RELEASE I hereby authorize the University of Arkansas Libraries to duplicate this dissertation when needed for research and/or scholarship. Agreed_________________________________________ Banan Al-Daraiseh Refused_________________________________________ Banan Al-Daraiseh ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to my dissertation advisor and the chair of the committee, Professor Mohja Kahf, for her valuable supervision and guidance during the writing of this dissertation and during my journey through graduate school. I am also indebted to her for mentoring and training me to become a successful teacher of literature. I would also like to thank the other members of the committee, Professor Susan Marren and Professor Joel Gordon, for their faith in this work and their constructive suggestions and feedback. I am particularly grateful to Professor Gordon whose guidance, encouragement and enthusiasm enabled me to finally submit my dissertation. I have learned immensely from the conversations I had with him. Many thanks go to my colleagues and friends at the English Department for their genuine encouragement throughout the process. I would also like to thank my dear roommate and sister Isra, who provided me with much needed support throughout my last two years in graduate school. I am indebted to the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies, the Comparative Literature program, and the English Department at the University of Arkansas for providing me with the opportunity to pursue my graduate studies. I would also like to thank all faculty members and staff affiliated to these programs because without them, I wouldn‘t have succeeded in graduate school. I am deeply indebted to my family, my mother, my father, my siblings, Nidal, Sawsan, Suzan, Amani, Muhammad, Isra, and Majd, and my nephews and nieces, Muhammad Sh, Muhamad Z, Leen, Ahmad, and Wasan, whose patience, love and prayers kept me going. I would like to particularly thank my niece, Raneem, for her sense of humor when constantly reminding me in standard Arabic that writing a risallah (risallah means dissertation in spoken Arabic but means letter in Standard Arabic) takes less than an hour! Last but not least, I am grateful to my dear fiancé, Firas, for always listening to me and being there for me while writing the dissertation despite the distance that separates us—and, of course, for calling me and waking me up early in the morning to write every time my alarm failed! DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my dear parents, Fathieh Zo‘ubi and Ahmad Daraiseh, whose unconditional love and support made me believe in myself. Mom and Dad, this is for you! TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. CHAPTER ONE 40 III. CHAPTER TWO 98 IV. CHAPTER THREE 131 V. CONCLUSION 190 VI. NOTES 196 VII. REFERENCES 199 Introduction This study examines the trope of women‘s 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 heterogeneous and 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. The trope of journey allows the representation of the women, their subjectivities, and the texts as dynamic literary products circulating across dynamic and unfixed cultural and geographic borderlines. In addition, mobility allows these protagonists to defy any attempt to be defined solely by a certain geographic location, discourse, ideology, or literary tradition. Movement and journey in the selected texts and in the lives of these women protagonists and/or author provides a means to representing these unpredictable, unfixed, and hybrid subjectivities. This dissertation underscores how the trope of journey becomes a fresh narrative strategy used by Arab women writers that allows the representation of the instability and unpredictability of identity. The aim of using journey as a narrative strategy is to destabilize the construction of identity and move away from fixed assumptions and stereotypical representations of Arab women. As a result, the journey trope serves both as a way of examining the varied representations of Arab woman subjectivities and of destabilizing fixed notions of gendered, cultural, and religious identity formations. This dissertation focuses on analyzing the representation of the shifting subjectivities of Arab women and their interaction with the cultural, geographic, and religious dynamics that contribute to the unpredictable and dynamic representation of these subjectivities. The primary texts analyzed in this study are Samman‘s 1 Beirut 75 and The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase, Soueif‘s In the Eye of the Sun, and Aboulela‘s The Translator and Minaret. This dissertation addresses the way these literary representations of the trope of journey demonstrate how travel creates a geographic in-between space for the protagonists 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 author/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 that in turn enables them to create individual narratives that counter fixed Western Orientalist, Neo-Orientalist, and traditional local patriarchal discourses that present them at different