Scheherazade Unbowed: Muslim Arab Women Diaspoetics in Fadia Faqir’s The Cry of the Dove (2007)

Abstract

The present paper examines the Arab folkloric character of Scheherazade within the paradigm of diaspoetics through doublings, anachronistic spaces, and contrapuntalism to interrogate the hybrid and ambivalent Muslim Arab women identity oscillating between Oriental heritage and Occidental culture. Muslim Arab women writers in diaspora produce diasporic literature with identities in transit. They create ambivalent identities that show attraction to and repulsion of both cultures of the Occident and the Orient. Stereotyping, introjection, male gaze, colonial sentiments are analyzed to show repressive and aggressive schemes that affect the processes of women identity formation in both cultures. Fadia Faqir’s novel, The Cry of the Dove, is analyzed as an example of Muslim Arab diaspoetics. Thus, the paper builds upon writings of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Sudesh Mishra and Elaine Showalter. Moreover, it makes use of some psychoanalytical notions such as ego, alter ego, and introjection. By so doing, the diasporic women identity is revealed in a state of becoming, straddled in between two hostile cultures of the Orient and the Occident.