Rewriting the image: Sports and subalternity in Yusuf Al- Seba’i’s My Heart is back

Abstract

The study proposes to rediscover the dialectics of the revolutionary element in the Egyptian identity from the perspective of sports and to crystalise its vital role in constructing the national identity. Through sports, the characters in Yusuf Al- Seba’i’s distinguished novel My Heart is back (1954) shoulder the task of disentangling themselves from the shackles of subalternity; they take of sports an instrument that rewrites their individual little histories on basis of a palimpsestic approach (Jose Rabasa argues that history is evident through the metaphor of the “palimpsest” that was used for mapping the world. Actually, the colonisers applied the same technique of erasures and overwritings for remapping the history of the colonised nations. [For more information see Rabasa, José (1993). “Allegories of Atlas.” Postcolonial Studies Reader. (eds.) Bill Ashcroft et al. London: Routledge, 1995. 358–64.]) of erasures and overwritings. The accumulation of their little histories redefines and rewrites the grand narrative of the whole nation. In the process, it also invokes a discourse of reterritorialisation which helps move the Egyptian people from the margins to the centre as they regain their territory as natives who should be in power. As a consequence, the cycle of history witnesses a major epoch with which a new epistéme of power is initiated.