Monday Session II 10:45-12:45 | Room: Al Majlis
Monday Session II: 10:45-12:45 Room: Al Majlis Humanities: Literature/Literary Studies Session Chair: Kenneth DiMaggio 33919
10:45-11:15 | Room: Al Majlis
The Eastern Woman as Seen by the Western Characters in Fatat Misr [The Maiden of Egypt] 1906 by Ya'Qub Sarruf Mansour Dhabab, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia
This research discusses the idea of intermarriage between East and West through the vision of Ya'qub Sarruf in the novel Fatat Misr, published in 1906. Sarruf named his novel “The Maiden of Egypt” so as to symbolise the whole nation in one woman. He fought against the West not through resistance, but by the opinions he expressed through his writing. Was the relationship between East and West built on peace and understanding? The following sections will discuss the relationship between Henry (who represents the West) and Bahiyya (who represents the East). The conclusions will help to answer the following questions: how was the Western man imagined and seen by the Eastern woman? What were the views of the Westerner's family (in this case Dora, Henry's sister) regarding the Eastern woman? What were the factors that influenced the relationship between the West and the East? How did the author describe the City of London and materialistic life in the West? And finally, what, according to the writer, was the East lacking in order to attain the high levels of development found in the West? This research then analyses the main obstacles to East–West relations and introduces suggestions to overcome it. 34957
11:15-11:45 | Room: Al Majlis
The Mare in Miral Al-Tahawy's The Tent
Shahd Alshammari, Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait Arab Bedouin communities have long been a subject of analysis by Oriental scholars. There has been a great tendency to exoticize the Bedouin man, and particularly the Bedouin women. A custom often overlooked and misunderstood is the significance of the ideology of “asil” or “pure blood”. It was as important to keep the family’s blood line “pure” as it was to maintain the horse’s, or mare’s, breeding. I plan on examining this idea throughout my paper. When Bedouin women occupy the same space as the mare, is this utter objectification of their bodies, or perhaps, is there a huge value placed on the woman? The mare’s significance has also been present in some works of literature. The Tent, by Miral al-Tahawy, presents us with a protagonist, Fatima, who loses her mare to a foreign Orientalist in exchange for her education. With the mare’s loss comes Fatima’s loss of self and identity, and eventual descent into madness. The mare is significant to Bedouin culture, and it is this contact with the colonizer that threatens the culture and the psyche. This paper will combine both cultural ideologies as well as a literary examination of the above mentioned work. It aims to present a new approach at looking at the significance of the mare in Bedouin culture and literature. 34211
11:45-12:15 | Room: Al Majlis
Identity Quest: When East Meets West in Bahaa Taher's Sunset Oasis: A Post-Colonial Reading Mona Kattaya, Ain Shams University, Egypt
The cultural representation of the Western Other in modern Arabic fiction is a formidable body of texts that stretches over a span of almost one hundred years – from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present. Emerging out of the experience of colonization, most of these fictional narratives have asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial Other, thus emphasizing a discourse where the encounter between East and West, whether literal or metaphorical, has been presented in a series of deep-rooted dichotomies of East/West, colonized/colonizer, slave/ master, backward/civilized, material/spiritual, bonded/free, ruled/free, etc. From this cultural output stands out Bahaa Taher’s Sunset Oasis (2007). The winner of the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in March 2008, Sunset Oasis in a way continues the initial perceptions of the West in Arab fiction, but, more importantly, it, in other ways, contests them. This paper throws light on how, in its decidedly holistic perspective, Taher’s novel goes beyond the usual chaos and conflict into spaces of love, understanding, harmony, equality, dialogue, exploration, compatibility and reconciliation. This paper addresses the question of representation in Sunset Oasis on both thematic and technical levels. The paper aims to study how the Arab/Eastern narrative-self, Taher’s in this case, represents and perceives of the West, and how this West lives in the Eastern consciousness and subconscious as part of the Self; negating it is an obliteration of the Self, an obliteration of an essential part to discover itself. 33294
12:15-12:45 | Room: Al Majlis
When One Novel Talks with Another: The Dialogue Between Camus' The Stranger and Kamal Daoud's The Meursault Investigation Kenneth DiMaggio, Capital Community College, USA
One of the twentieth century's major works of fiction is Camus' The Stranger, a novel where a French Algerian kills an Arab and is executed for it. Is his condemnation based more on his disinterest in the recent passing of his mother? For many years, Meursault, the protagonist of this novel, beguiled readers with his absurd-like act of murder. But neither Meursault nor his Western-reading audience ever took much notice of his victim. Recently, Algerian author Kamal Daoud wrote about this victim in his novel The Meursault Investigation. Daoud's novel becomes a dialogue with the text that gave birth to his story. If Camus' The Stranger is the French father, then Daoud's The Meursault Investigation is the Algerian stepson. But father and stepson are also texts that share the same story, landscape, and even destiny. In so doing, Meursault's murder may seem less absurd now that we know about his victim – a fully developed character in Daoud's novel. If the nameless Arab victim in Camus' text represents the overlooked colonized subject, he becomes the independent character rewriting a narrative he previously had no voice in. IAFOR Dubai 2017 | IAFOR.ORG | 45