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The Haunted Body: Narrating Violence in Seba al-Herz's "The Others"
Abstract
The recent successful collaboration between young Arab writers and independent publishers has not only redefined the Arab literary scene, but has also introduced new voices that are experimenting with language, themes, and narrative techniques. Literary critics have placed Seba al-Herz's The Others (2009, al-Akharun 2007) within the nascent literary genre represented by Arab and specifically Saudi Arabian women writers such as Rajaa Alsanea, whose literary contribution addresses the concerns of young Saudi women with varying degrees of humor and realism. Despite their thematic complexity and stylistic diversity, the generation of Arab women writers to which Seba al-Herz belongs has been acclaimed for its apparent transgression of the confines of Islam, the imagined Arab harem, and the threshold of heteronormativity. Al-Herz's novel, however, stages a unique exploration of the psychic and physical imprints of political violence and transgenerational memory, weaved in a complex narrative structure that deserves thorough investigation. In examining The Others, I argue that the personal and communal heritage of violence and loss that marks the memory of the Saudi Arabian Shiite protagonist haunts her present and triggers her recurring mental and physical collapses. The violent Saudi oppression of the Shiite communities in the eighties defines the novel's dark tone and consumes the epileptic narrator. Mirroring the ancestors persecutions on her own body, transforming it into a site of repressed violence, a theater of laments. This paper is specifically attentive to Seba al-Herz's writing techniques, which inscribe the narrative within a religious Shiite framework evoking religious imageries of collective suffering and internalized pain. Finally, I argue that through its thematic exploration of trauma and transgenerational memory, The Others distances itself from the representations of political violence in contemporary Arabic literature as it challenges its overarching ideological premises.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Armenian Studies